The Greatest Books of All Time

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This list represents a comprehensive and trusted collection of the greatest books in literature. Developed through a specialized algorithm, it brings together 196 'best of' book lists to form a definitive guide to the world's most acclaimed literary works. For those interested in how these books are chosen, additional details about the selection process can be found on the rankings page .

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1. Ulysses by James Joyce

Cover of 'Ulysses' by James Joyce

Set in Dublin, the novel follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, as he navigates the city. The narrative, heavily influenced by Homer's Odyssey, explores themes of identity, heroism, and the complexities of everyday life. It is renowned for its stream-of-consciousness style and complex structure, making it a challenging but rewarding read.

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Cover of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This novel is a multi-generational saga that focuses on the Buendía family, who founded the fictional town of Macondo. It explores themes of love, loss, family, and the cyclical nature of history. The story is filled with magical realism, blending the supernatural with the ordinary, as it chronicles the family's experiences, including civil war, marriages, births, and deaths. The book is renowned for its narrative style and its exploration of solitude, fate, and the inevitability of repetition in history.

3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Cover of 'In Search of Lost Time' by Marcel Proust

This renowned novel is a sweeping exploration of memory, love, art, and the passage of time, told through the narrator's recollections of his childhood and experiences into adulthood in the late 19th and early 20th century aristocratic France. The narrative is notable for its lengthy and intricate involuntary memory episodes, the most famous being the "madeleine episode". It explores the themes of time, space and memory, but also raises questions about the nature of art and literature, and the complex relationships between love, sexuality, and possession.

4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cover of 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Set in the summer of 1922, the novel follows the life of a young and mysterious millionaire, his extravagant lifestyle in Long Island, and his obsessive love for a beautiful former debutante. As the story unfolds, the millionaire's dark secrets and the corrupt reality of the American dream during the Jazz Age are revealed. The narrative is a critique of the hedonistic excess and moral decay of the era, ultimately leading to tragic consequences.

5. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Cover of 'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes

This classic novel follows the adventures of a man who, driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances, decides to become a knight-errant and roam the world righting wrongs under the name Don Quixote. Accompanied by his loyal squire, Sancho Panza, he battles windmills he believes to be giants and champions the virtuous lady Dulcinea, who is in reality a simple peasant girl. The book is a richly layered critique of the popular literature of Cervantes' time and a profound exploration of reality and illusion, madness and sanity.

6. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Cover of 'The Catcher in the Rye' by J. D. Salinger

The novel follows the story of a teenager named Holden Caulfield, who has just been expelled from his prep school. The narrative unfolds over the course of three days, during which Holden experiences various forms of alienation and his mental state continues to unravel. He criticizes the adult world as "phony" and struggles with his own transition into adulthood. The book is a profound exploration of teenage rebellion, alienation, and the loss of innocence.

7. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Cover of 'Moby Dick' by Herman Melville

The novel is a detailed narrative of a vengeful sea captain's obsessive quest to hunt down a giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg. The captain's relentless pursuit, despite the warnings and concerns of his crew, leads them on a dangerous journey across the seas. The story is a complex exploration of good and evil, obsession, and the nature of reality, filled with rich descriptions of whaling and the sea.

8. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Cover of 'Crime and Punishment' by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A young, impoverished former student in Saint Petersburg, Russia, formulates a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker to redistribute her wealth among the needy. However, after carrying out the act, he is consumed by guilt and paranoia, leading to a psychological battle within himself. As he grapples with his actions, he also navigates complex relationships with a variety of characters, including a virtuous prostitute, his sister, and a relentless detective. The narrative explores themes of morality, redemption, and the psychological impacts of crime.

9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Cover of 'War and Peace' by Leo Tolstoy

Set in the backdrop of the Napoleonic era, the novel presents a panorama of Russian society and its descent into the chaos of war. It follows the interconnected lives of five aristocratic families, their struggles, romances, and personal journeys through the tumultuous period of history. The narrative explores themes of love, war, and the meaning of life, as it weaves together historical events with the personal stories of its characters.

10. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

Cover of 'Nineteen Eighty Four' by George Orwell

Set in a dystopian future, the novel presents a society under the total control of a totalitarian regime, led by the omnipresent Big Brother. The protagonist, a low-ranking member of 'the Party', begins to question the regime and falls in love with a woman, an act of rebellion in a world where independent thought, dissent, and love are prohibited. The novel explores themes of surveillance, censorship, and the manipulation of truth.

11. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Cover of 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Brontë

This classic novel is a tale of love, revenge and social class set in the Yorkshire moors. It revolves around the intense, complex relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, an orphan adopted by Catherine's father. Despite their deep affection for each other, Catherine marries Edgar Linton, a wealthy neighbor, leading Heathcliff to seek revenge on the two families. The story unfolds over two generations, reflecting the consequences of their choices and the destructive power of obsessive love.

12. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Cover of 'Pride and Prejudice' by Jane Austen

Set in early 19th-century England, this classic novel revolves around the lives of the Bennet family, particularly the five unmarried daughters. The narrative explores themes of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage within the society of the landed gentry. It follows the romantic entanglements of Elizabeth Bennet, the second eldest daughter, who is intelligent, lively, and quick-witted, and her tumultuous relationship with the proud, wealthy, and seemingly aloof Mr. Darcy. Their story unfolds as they navigate societal expectations, personal misunderstandings, and their own pride and prejudice.

13. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Cover of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll

This novel follows the story of a young girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantastical world full of peculiar creatures and bizarre experiences. As she navigates through this strange land, she encounters a series of nonsensical events, including a tea party with a Mad Hatter, a pool of tears, and a trial over stolen tarts. The book is renowned for its playful use of language, logic, and its exploration of the boundaries of reality.

14. The Bible by Christian Church

Cover of 'The Bible' by Christian Church

This religious text is a compilation of 66 books divided into the Old and New Testaments, forming the central narrative for Christianity. It encompasses a variety of genres, including historical accounts, poetry, prophecy, and teaching, telling the story of God's relationship with humanity, from creation to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the early Christian church. It is considered by believers to be divinely inspired and serves as a guide for faith and practice.

15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Cover of 'Lolita' by Vladimir Nabokov

The novel tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a man with a disturbing obsession for young girls, or "nymphets" as he calls them. His obsession leads him to engage in a manipulative and destructive relationship with his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Lolita. The narrative is a controversial exploration of manipulation, obsession, and unreliable narration, as Humbert attempts to justify his actions and feelings throughout the story.

16. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Cover of 'The Divine Comedy' by Dante Alighieri

In this epic poem, the protagonist embarks on an extraordinary journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso). Guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil and his beloved Beatrice, he encounters various historical and mythological figures in each realm, witnessing the eternal consequences of earthly sins and virtues. The journey serves as an allegory for the soul's progression towards God, offering profound insights into the nature of good and evil, free will, and divine justice.

17. The Odyssey by Homer

Cover of 'The Odyssey' by Homer

This epic poem follows the Greek hero Odysseus on his journey home after the fall of Troy. It takes Odysseus ten years to reach Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War. Along the way, he encounters many obstacles including mythical creatures, divine beings, and natural disasters. Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope and son Telemachus fend off suitors vying for Penelope's hand in marriage, believing Odysseus to be dead. The story concludes with Odysseus's return, his slaughter of the suitors, and his reunion with his family.

18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Cover of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' by Mark Twain

The novel follows the journey of a young boy named Huckleberry Finn and a runaway slave named Jim as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft. Set in the American South before the Civil War, the story explores themes of friendship, freedom, and the hypocrisy of society. Through various adventures and encounters with a host of colorful characters, Huck grapples with his personal values, often clashing with the societal norms of the time.

19. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Cover of 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This classic novel explores the complex, passionate, and troubled relationship between four brothers and their father in 19th century Russia. The narrative delves into the themes of faith, doubt, morality, and redemption, as each brother grapples with personal dilemmas and family conflicts. The story culminates in a dramatic trial following a murder, which serves as a microcosm of the moral and philosophical struggles faced by each character, and by extension, humanity itself.

20. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Cover of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' by Harper Lee

Set in the racially charged South during the Depression, the novel follows a young girl and her older brother as they navigate their small town's societal norms and prejudices. Their father, a lawyer, is appointed to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, forcing the children to confront the harsh realities of racism and injustice. The story explores themes of morality, innocence, and the loss of innocence through the eyes of the young protagonists.

21. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Cover of 'Anna Karenina' by Leo Tolstoy

Set in 19th-century Russia, this novel revolves around the life of Anna Karenina, a high-society woman who, dissatisfied with her loveless marriage, embarks on a passionate affair with a charming officer named Count Vronsky. This scandalous affair leads to her social downfall, while parallel to this, the novel also explores the rural life and struggles of Levin, a landowner who seeks the meaning of life and true happiness. The book explores themes such as love, marriage, fidelity, societal norms, and the human quest for happiness.

22. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Cover of 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad

This classic novel follows the journey of a seaman who travels up the Congo River into the African interior to meet a mysterious ivory trader. Throughout his journey, he encounters the harsh realities of imperialism, the brutal treatment of native Africans, and the depths of human cruelty and madness. The protagonist's journey into the 'heart of darkness' serves as both a physical exploration of the African continent and a metaphorical exploration into the depths of human nature.

23. The Iliad by Homer

Cover of 'The Iliad' by Homer

This epic poem focuses on the final weeks of the Trojan War, a conflict between the city of Troy and the Greek city-states. The story explores themes of war, honor, wrath, and divine intervention, with a particular focus on the Greek hero Achilles, whose anger and refusal to fight have devastating consequences. The narrative also delves into the lives of the gods, their relationships with humans, and their influence on the course of events.

24. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Cover of 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary is a tragic novel about a young woman, Emma Bovary, who is married to a dull, but kind-hearted doctor. Dissatisfied with her life, she embarks on a series of extramarital affairs and indulges in a luxurious lifestyle in an attempt to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Her desire for passion and excitement leads her down a path of financial ruin and despair, ultimately resulting in a tragic end.

25. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Cover of 'The Sound and the Fury' by William Faulkner

The novel is a complex exploration of the tragic Compson family from the American South. Told from four distinct perspectives, the story unfolds through stream of consciousness narratives, each revealing their own understanding of the family's decline. The characters grapple with post-Civil War societal changes, personal loss, and their own mental instability. The narrative is marked by themes of time, innocence, and the burdens of the past.

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The Marginalian

The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125 Famous Authors

By maria popova.

famous authors of books

Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list — so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point.

In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:

If you’re putting together a list of ‘the greatest books,’ you’ll want to do two things: (1) out of kindness, avoid anyone working on a novel; and (2) decide what the word ‘great’ means. The first part is easy, but how about the second? A short list of possible definitions of ‘greatness’ might look like this: 1. ‘Great’ means ‘books that have been greatest for me.’ 2. ‘Great’ means ‘books that would be considered great by the most people over time.’ 3. ‘Great’ has nothing to do with you or me — or people at all. It involves transcendental concepts like God or the Sublime. 4. ‘Great’? I like Tom Clancy.

From David Foster Wallace (#1: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis) to Stephen King (#1: The Golden Argosy , a 1955 anthology of the best short stories in the English language), the collection offers a rare glimpse of the building blocks of great creators’ combinatorial creativity — because, as Austin Kleon put it, “you are a mashup of what you let into your life.”

famous authors of books

The book concludes with an appendix of “literary number games” summing up some patterns and constructing several overall rankings based on the totality of the different authors’ picks. Among them (*with links to free public domain works where available):

TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
  • Ulysses * by James Joyce
  • Dubliners * by James Joyce
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  • To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  • The complete stories of Flannery O’Connor
  • Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 19th CENTURY

  • Anna Karenina * by Leo Tolstoy
  • Madame Bovary * by Gustave Flaubert
  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • The stories of Anton Chekhov
  • Middlemarch * by George Eliot
  • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  • Great Expectations * by Charles Dickens
  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Emma * by Jane Austen

TOP TEN AUTHORS BY NUMBER OF BOOKS SELECTED

  • William Shakespeare — 11
  • William Faulkner — 6
  • Henry James — 6
  • Jane Austen — 5
  • Charles Dickens — 5
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky — 5
  • Ernest Hemingway — 5
  • Franz Kafka — 5
  • (tie) James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf — 4

TOP TEN AUTHORS BY POINTS EARNED

  • Leo Tolstoy — 327
  • William Shakespeare — 293
  • James Joyce — 194
  • Vladimir Nabokov — 190
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky — 177
  • William Faulkner — 173
  • Charles Dickens — 168
  • Anton Chekhov — 165
  • Gustave Flaubert — 163
  • Jane Austen — 161

As a nonfiction loyalist, I’d love a similar anthology of nonfiction favorites — then again, famous writers might wave a knowing finger and point me to the complex relationship between truth and fiction .

— Published January 30, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/01/30/writers-top-ten-favorite-books/ —

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No Sweat Shakespeare

Famous Authors: The 30 Greatest Writers Of All Time

Who are the most  most famous authors the world has ever known ? Perhaps that’s not the real question: we should instead be asking, ‘how can we judge’? With that in mind one can begin to talk about criteria. One can think about which famous writers had the most influence on the world as a result of what they wrote, or how their writings changed the world.

We don’t necessarily have to talk about their writing style or how good their prose is, as that is, in any case, far too subjective: their greatness could simply be about their ideas – ideas that grab the attention of the world and change the world’s perceptions forever. In that case the writing would only be a vehicle for the transmission of the idea they wish to convey. That idea or theory or research is the reason for writing the book.

And then, particularly if we are including Shakespeare as one of the influential writers, we need to look at what kind of writing we are talking about. Shakespeare falls into the fiction writer category and so, perhaps, to find our best writers we should look at other fiction writers whose work had something like the influence of William Shakespeare’s. It should therefore be clear that our list of the thirty greatest writers are all fiction writers. Our criterion will be that they should be poets, dramatists and prose fiction writers who have had a significant influence on the writers who came after them or on the direction of society.

But who, apart from Shakespeare, are the greatest writers of all time? Without further ado, here is a list of thirty of the greatest writers of all time offered by NoSweatShakespeare. It would be impossible to rank them so they are listed in order of their birth dates:

Homer ~850 BCE

homer-writer

Sophocles 496-406 BCE

Sophocles-writers

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 70 BCE – 19 BCE

Virgil-writer

The Evangelist, Mark (Author of the Gospel of St Mark) 1st Century CE

saint-mark-writer

Dante (Durante degli Alighieri) 1265-1321

Dante-alighieri-writer

Geoffrey Chaucer 1343-1400

Famous Authors: The 30 Greatest Writers Of All Time 1

Francois Rabelais 1498-1553

francois-rabelais-writer

Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Cortinas) 1547-1616

miguel-de-cervantes-writer

John Donne 1572-1631

John Donne

John Milton 1608-1674

John Milton portrait

John Bunyan (1628-1688)

john-bunyan-writer

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 1694-1778

voltaire-writer

William Blake 1757-1827

William Blake portrait Blake portrait

Jane Austen 1775 – 1817

Jane Austin

Hans Christian Andersen 1805-1875

hans-christian-anderson-writer

Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish playwright, travel writer, poet, novelist and story writer. His fairy tales place him as one of the world’s greatest writers ever. Written basically for children they transcend age barriers because of their universal nature: they reach the deepest levels of the human condition, each story demonstrating something profound about what it means to be a human being… Read more on Hans Christian Anderson >>

Charles Dickens 1812-1870

Charles Dickens photograph

Herman Melville 1819-1891

Herman-Melville-writer

Gustave Flaubert 1821-1880

gustav-flaubert-writer

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky 1821-1881

fyodor-dostoyevsky-writer

Jules Verne 1828-1905

jules-verne-writer

Leo Tolstoy (Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy) 1828-1910

leo-tolstoy-writer

Emily Dickinson 1830-1886

emily-dickinson-writer

Unknown as a poet during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now regarded by many as one of the most powerful voices of American culture. Her poetry has inspired many other writers, including the Brontes. In 1994 the critic, Harold Bloom, listed her among the twenty-six central writers of Western civilization.  After she died her sister found the almost two thousand poems the poet had written… Read Emily Dickinson quotes . Read more on Emily Dickinson >>

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 1832-1898

lewis-carroll-writer

James Joyce 1882-1941

james-joyce-writer

Franz Kafka 1883-1924

franz-kafka-writer

T.S. Eliot 1888-1965

F scott fitzgerald 1896-1940.

f-scott-fitzgerald-writer

Jorge Luis Borges 1899-1986

Jorge-Luis-Borges-writer

George Orwell 1903-1950

George Orwell photo

Gabriel Garcia Marques 1927-2014

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Like our list of the thirty greatest writers of all time? Any we’re missing? Check out our list of famous English writers , and most famous American authors .

Fiction writers do not write to transmit an idea or report on research they have done. They use language to make us think that their inventions are real, that the places they create actually exist and that their characters are real people, like us, who love and hate and suffer and strive. They invite us to enter into the world of their text and although they usually write only to entertain, there is a sense in that they point to truths just as real as those reached by Darwin and Einstein. If they do that at the highest level, in creating a world that we both recognise and can be inspired by, they reveal themselves as great writers and influence the world in that way. Like Shakespeare.

So who are these writers who can be placed in the same category as Shakespeare for doing that? Shakespeare is, of course, foremost among the great writers. Apart from writing plays that can be held up like mirrors in which we can see ourselves as human beings clearly, and come to an understanding of many of the things that make us human, Shakespeare’s poetry has had a profound effect on the English language: the way we use it today has been shaped by his words and phrases. It can be difficult at times to utter a sentence in English without using a construction first used by Shakespeare. And whenever we need to find a phrase that will sum something we want to say up perfectly and beautifully, we will find a phrase somewhere in Shakespeare’s works .

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Ratherrapid

The #2, #3 and #4 writers of all time seem to be missing from this list: #1 Shakespeare #2 Faust as translated by the great poet Walter Arndt–Part II Act V = to anything in Mr. S. and maybe exceeds. #3 Daniel Deronda by G. Eliot #4 Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon #5 Middlemarch

Brian Daly

To include neither Proust nor Faulkner is preposterous. No reasonable critic places Orwell, Carrol, Verne or Christian-Anderson above them.

WVC

Mr Daly, Your post, at best, is an organized mess. To define in an absolute term that a “reasonable critic” should side with you, is a crash landing of opinion. Your suggestions of authors Faulkner and Proust, is purely for dramatic effect. Salinger and King are above them all.

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Top 100 authors of all time

1. fyodor dostoevsky.

Writer | The Double

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia. He was the second of seven children of Mikhail Andreevich and Maria Dostoevsky. His father, a doctor, was a member of the Russian nobility, owned serfs and had a considerable estate near Moscow where he lived with his ...

2. Dante Alighieri

Writer | Junkie Hell

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 into the lower nobility of Florence, to Alighiero di Bellincione d'Alighiero, a moneylender. A precocious student, Dante's education focused on rhetoric and grammar. He also became enamored with a young girl, Beatrice Portinari, whose death in 1290 threw a grieving ...

3. Lev Tolstoy

Writer | Anna Karenina

Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in his ancestral estate Yasnaya Polyana, South of Moscow, Russia. He was the fourth of five children in a wealthy family of Russian landed Gentry. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his elder brothers and ...

4. Victor Hugo

Writer | Les Misérables

Although Hugo was fascinated by poems from childhood on, he spent some time at the polytechnic university of Paris until he dedicated all his work to literature. He was one of the few authors who were allowed to reach popularity during his own lifetime and one of the leaders of French romance. After...

5. William Shakespeare

Writer | The Tragedy of Macbeth

William Shakespeare's birthdate is assumed from his baptism on April 25. His father John was the son of a farmer who became a successful tradesman; his mother Mary Arden was gentry. He studied Latin works at Stratford Grammar School, leaving at about age 15. About this time his father suffered an ...

6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Soundtrack | Valkyrie

Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born on 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany as son of a lawyer. After growing up in a privileged upper middle class family, he studied law in Leipzig from 1765 to 1768, although he was more interested in literature. As he was seriously ill, he had to interrupt ...

7. Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra

Writer | Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes' baptism occurred on October 9, 1547, at Alcala de Henares, Spain, so it is reasonable to assume he was born around that time, and Alcala de Henares has long claimed itself as his birthplace. The son of Rodrigo de Cervantes, an itinerant and not-too-successful surgeon, Miguel ...

8. Italo Calvino

Writer | Boccaccio '70

Italo Calvino was born on October 15, 1923 in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba. He was a writer, known for Boccaccio '70 (1962), Tiko and the Shark (1962) and Sex Can Be Difficult (1962). He was married to Esther Judith Singer. He died on September 19, 1985 in Siena, Tuscany, Italy.

9. Stendhal

Writer | The Red and the Black

A foremost French writer of the Romantic era, Stendhal was born Marie-Henri Beyle in Grenoble, France in 1783. A loyal Bonapartist he followed Napoleon closely during his military campaigns Stendhal's novels reflect his intense love of Italy, his political convictions and the moral and ...

10. Charles Baudelaire

Soundtrack | A Single Man

Charles Baudelaire was a 19th century French poet, translator, and literary/art critic. At his birth, Baudelaire's mother, Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, was 28; his father Francois Baudelaire was 61. Charles' father instilled in him an appreciation for art, taking his young son to museums and ...

11. Marcel Proust

Writer | La captive

Marcel Proust was a French intellectual, author and critic, best known for his seven-volume fiction 'In search of Lost Time'. He coined the term "involuntary memory", which became also known as "Proust effect" in modern psychology. He was born Valentin Louis Georges Eugéne Marcel Proust, on July 10, ...

12. Giovanni Boccaccio

Writer | The Little Hours

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in June 1313 in Certaldo, Florence, Tuscany, Italy. He was a writer, known for The Little Hours (2017), Decameron Nights (1953) and The Decameron (1971). He died on December 21, 1375 in Certaldo, Florence, Tuscany, Italy.

13. Alexander Pushkin

Soundtrack | Florence Foster Jenkins

Born to noble parents (his father Sergei was a retired major, and his mother, Nadezhda, was the granddaughter of an ennobled Ethiopian general) on the 26th of May, 1799 in Moscow, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin became involved with a liberal underground revolutionary group that saw him exiled to the ...

14. Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi

Writer | Rumi: Poet of the Heart

Jalaluddin Rumi, Scholar in Religious Sciences and famed Sufi Mystic Poet, was born on September 29th 1207 A.D. in Balkh (modern day Afghanistan). Escaping Mongol invasions he travelled extensively to Muslim lands, Bagdad, Mecca, Damascus, Malatia (Turkey). Married Gevher Khatun of Samarquand and ...

15. Franz Kafka

Writer | Le procès

Franz Kafka was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austrian Empire, in 1883. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a business owner and a domestic tyrant, frequently abusing his son. Kafka later admitted to his father, "My writing was all about you...". He believed that his father broke ...

16. Anton Chekhov

Writer | Kis Uykusu

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov...

17. Gabriel García Márquez

Writer | El año de la peste

Major Latin-American author of novels and short stories, a central figure in the so-called magical realism movement in Latin American literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. Studied law and journalism in Bogotá and Cartagena. He began his career as a journalist in 1948, ...

18. Umberto Eco

Writer | Der Name der Rose

He is a professor of semiotics, the study of communication through signs and symbols, at the University of Bologna. Also a philiosopher, a historian, literary critic, and an aesthetician. He is an avid book collector and owns more than 30,000 volumes. The subjects of his scholarly investigations ...

19. J.R.R. Tolkien

Writer | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

English writer, scholar and philologist, Tolkien's father was a bank manager in South Africa. Shortly before his father died (1896) his mother took him and his younger brother to his father's native village of Sarehole, near Birmingham, England. The landscapes and Nordic mythology of the Midlands ...

20. William Faulkner

Writer | To Have and Have Not

William Faulkner, one of the 20th century's most gifted novelists, wrote for the movies in part because he could not make enough money from his novels and short stories to support his growing number of dependants. The author of such acclaimed novels as "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom...

Writer | Abel Classics

Greek slave. Many of the 200+ fables attributed to him may not have been his own, but since his name is synonymous with fables they were credited to him anyway. Sentenced to death for heresy. Was thrown from the edge of a cliff, c. 560 BC. The excepted dates of his birth and death would mean that ...

22. Arthur Rimbaud

Writer | Ein großer graublauer Vogel

Arthur Rimbaud was born on October 20, 1854 in Charleville-Mézières, Ardennes, France. He was a writer, known for A Big Grey-Blue Bird (1970), Ardiente paciencia (1983) and Criminal Lovers (1999). He died on November 10, 1891 in Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.

23. Aristophanes

Writer | Chi-Raq

Ancient Greek poet and comic dramatist Aristophanes was the son of Philippus of Athens. A leading exponent of the Athenian "Old Comedy," Aristophanes lived most of his life during the Peloponnesian War against Sparta (431-404). Some of his works include "Acharnians" (425), "Knights" (424), "In the ...

24. Ivan Turgenev

Writer | Theatre Macabre

Ivan Turgenev was born into a wealthy landowning family with many serfs, in the city of Oryol in Southern Russia. His father, a cavalry colonel, died when he was 15, and he was raised by his abusive mother, who ruled her 5000 serfs ruthlessly with a whip. He never married, but fathered a daughter ...

25. Sophocles

Writer | Atlantis

Versatile Greek poet and tragic dramatist. He was the son of Sophilus, a wealthy arms manufacturer. Sophocles studied tragedy under Aeschylus, whom he subsequently defeated in the dramatic festival of 468 BC, thus gaining his first victory at these competitions. He became a general under Nicias and...

26. Molière

Writer | Le bourgeois gentilhomme

Born between January 13 and January 15 of the year 1622, from a 25yo tapestry-maker, Jean Poguelin (who worked for the King of France from 1631), and a 20yo woman, Marie Cresé, in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin lost his mother when he was 10. From 1638 to 1640, he studied in the Jesuit college of ...

27. Charles Dickens

Writer | Great Expectations

Charles Dickens' father was a clerk at the Naval Pay Office, and because of this the family had to move from place to place: Plymouth, London, Chatham. It was a large family and despite hard work, his father couldn't earn enough money. In 1823 he was arrested for debt and Charles had to start ...

28. Maxim Gorky

Writer | Famine

Maksim Gorky is a pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, who was born into a poor Russian family in Nizhnii Novgorod on Volga river. Gorky lost his father at an early age, he was beaten by his stepfather and became an orphan at age 9, when his mother died. He was brought up by his grandmother, ...

29. George Orwell

Writer | Nineteen Eighty-Four

Born the son of an Opium Agent in Bengal, Eric Blair was educated in England (Eton 1921). The joined the British Imperial Police in Burma, serving until 1927. He then travelled around England and Europe, doing various odd jobs to support his writing. By 1935 he had adopted the 'pen-name' of 'George...

30. Edgar Allan Poe

Writer | Eliza Graves

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, named David Poe Jr., and his mother, named Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were touring actors. Both parents died in 1811, and Poe became an orphan before he was 3 years old. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco ...

31. Publius Vergilius Maro

Writer | Troy: The Resurrection of Aeneas

Publius Vergilius Maro was born on October 15, 70 in Andes, Italy. Publius Vergilius was a writer, known for Troy: The Resurrection of Aeneas (2018), Great Performances (1971) and Dido & Aeneas (1995). Publius Vergilius died on September 21, 19 in Brundisium [now Brindisi, Italy].

32. Julio Cortázar

Writer | Blow-Up

One of the most important Argentinian writers of all time, Julio Cortazar was born in Belgium. When he was a child he went with his parents to Argentina. She stayed in Buenos Aires until 1951, when he went to Paris and he stayed in France until his death. His first book of short stories was "...

33. Nazim Hikmet

Soundtrack | Der Himmel über Berlin

Nazim Hikmet was born on January 15, 1902 in Salonica, Ottoman Empire [now Thessaloniki, Greece]. He was a writer and director, known for Wings of Desire (1987), Günese dogru (1937) and Dügün gecesi (1933). He was married to Wera Tuljakowa, Münevver and Piraye. He died on June 3, ...

34. Oscar Wilde

Writer | The Picture of Dorian Gray

A gifted poet, playwright and wit, Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in 19th-century England. He was illustrious for preaching the importance of style in life and art, and of attacking Victorian narrow-mindedness. Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin before ...

35. Jean de La Fontaine

Writer | La cicala e la formica

Born in July 8, 1621, in Château-Thierry (Champagne, France), where his father was in charge of Water, Forests and Hunting, Jean de la Fontaine spent his whole childhood and adolescence in the countryside, where he mainly studied Latin language. In 1641, he moved to Paris to continue his study at ...

36. Rainer Maria Rilke

Writer | René

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague on the 4th of December 1878 as the son of a military man working with railroads. After he visited a military Upper School he tried to avoid the army and did the preparations for the final exams and the final exams in private. He went to university to study ...

37. Lord Byron

Writer | Don Juan DeMarco

Lord Byron seemed destined from birth to tragedy. His father was the handsome but feckless Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and his mother the Scottish heiress Catherine Gordon, the only child of the Laird of Gight. Captain Byron abandoned his wife and child leaving Catherine to bring up young Byron on...

38. Hans Christian Andersen

Writer | Frozen

Andersen experienced an unhappy childhood marked by deep poverty. When he was 14 years old, he left his parents' home and fled alone to Copenhagen. Here the director of the Royal Theater, Jonas Collin, took care of the child and gave him shelter and work. With his help, the young Hans Christian ...

39. Thomas Mann

Writer | Morte a Venezia

Thomas Mann was probably Germany's most influential author of the 20th century, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Born on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, his family moved to Munich in 1893, where he lived until 1933 and wrote some of his most successful novels like "Buddenbrocks" (1901), "...

40. Alexandre Dumas

Writer | The Count of Monte Cristo

His paternal grandparents were Marie Cessete Dumas (a Haitian slave) and Marquis Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie. Antoine disapproved of their son, Thomas-Alexandre, joining the French army under the "Davy de la Pailleterie" name, so Thomas-Alexandre used his mother's surname instead. He became a ...

41. James Joyce

Triangle of Sadness

Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, on 2 February 1882. His father invested unwisely, and the family's fortunes declined steadily. Joyce graduated from University College Dublin (UCD), in 1902. He briefly studied medicine in Paris but his mother's impending death from cancer ...

42. Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Writer | Die Nacht

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born on May 27, 1894 in Courbevoie, Seine [now Hauts-de-Seine], France. He was a writer and actor, known for Die Nacht (1985), Contes modernes (1979) and Die Finsternis (2005). He was married to Lucette Almanzor and Edith Follet. He died on July 1, 1961 in Meudon, ...

43. Boris Pasternak

Writer | Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890 into an artistic family of Russian-Jewish heritage. His father was an acclaimed artist named Leonid Pasternak, who converted to Christianity, and his mother was a renown concert pianist named Rosa Kaufman. Their home was open to family friends...

44. Federico García Lorca

Soundtrack | Take This Waltz

Federíco Garcia Lorca was born in the south of Spain (Andalusia) in 1898 and soon became the region's most famous artist. A poet, playwright, artist, musician and lecturer, he wrote groundbreaking plays such as 'Blood Wedding' and 'Yerma'. His support of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s led to his...

45. Pablo Neruda

Writer | American Roulette

Pablo Neruda was the pseudonym of Chilean poet Ricardo Neftali Reyes Basualto. He was born in Parral, a little town in central Chile, but his family moved to Temuco City when he was just a few months old. It was there he showed interest in poetry and made his early works, and where he picked "Pablo...

Actor | Mil Adultérios

Borges is known for Mil Adultérios (1910).

47. Beaumarchais

Writer | La règle du jeu

Beaumarchais was born on January 24, 1732 in Paris, France. Beaumarchais was a writer, known for The Rules of the Game (1939), The Barber of Seville (1938) and The Marriage of Figaro (1949). Beaumarchais was married to Marie-Thérèse Willermawlaz, Geneviève Wattebled Lévêque and Madeleine Aubertin. ...

48. Naguib Mahfouz

Writer | El Fetewa

Naguib Mahfouz was born on December 11, 1911 in Cairo, Egypt. He was a writer, known for The Tough (1957), The Monster (1954) and Between Heaven and Earth (1959). He was married to Atiyyatallah Ibrahim. He died on August 30, 2006 in Cairo, Egypt.

49. Ursula K. Le Guin

Writer | Gedo senki

Ursula K. Le Guin was born on October 21, 1929 in Berkeley, California, USA. She was a writer, known for Tales from Earthsea (2006), The Lathe of Heaven (1980) and The Telling . She was married to Charles A. Le Guin. She died on January 22, 2018 in Portland, Oregon, USA.

50. Nikolay Gogol

Writer | Burnt Hickory

Nikolai (Mykola) Gogol was a Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist of Ukrainian origin. His ancestors were bearing the name of Gogol-Janovsky and claimed belonging to the upper class Polish Szlachta. Gogol's father, a Ukrainian writer living on his old family estate, had five other children. He...

51. Honoré de Balzac

Writer | The Conquering Power

Honoré de Balzac was a French writer whose works have been made into films, such as, Cousin Bette (1998) starring Jessica Lange , and television serials, such as, _Cousin Bette (1971 TV mini-series)_, starring Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren . He was born on March 20, 1799, in Tours, France. His ...

52. Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, which was made into a 1958 film The Old Man and the Sea (1958). He was born into the hands of his physician father. He was the second of six ...

53. Neil Gaiman

Writer | Good Omens

Neil Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. He is best known for the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. As a child and a teenager, Gaiman read the works of C. S. ...

54. Jean Racine

Writer | Phèdre

Jean-Baptiste Racine (22 December 1639 - 21 April 1699) was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille as well as an important literary figure in the Western tradition and world literature. Racine was primarily a tragedian, ...

55. Albert Camus

Writer | Bajo la metralla

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria. His parents were Spanish-French-Algerian (pied noir) colonists. His father, Lucien, died in the Battle of Marne (1914) during WWI. His mother, named Catherine Helene Sintes was of Spanish origin, she was a deaf mute due to a stroke, ...

56. Jean-Paul Sartre

Writer | Les orgueilleux

Jean-Paul Charles-Aymard Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France. His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, was an officer in the French Navy. His mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, was the cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer . Sartre was one year old when his father died. He was ...

57. Chingiz Aitmatov

Writer | Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalim

Chingiz Aitmatov was a Russian-Kyrgyz writer and statesman known for such films as The First Teacher (1965), The Girl with the Red Scarf (1977) and Джамиля (1995). He was born Chingiz Torekulovich Aitmatov on December 12, 1928, in Kirgizia, Soviet Union. His...

58. John Steinbeck

Writer | Lifeboat

John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 ...

59. Milan Kundera

Writer | The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera was born on April 1st 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He wrote his first poems during his high school years. After World War II he worked as a jazz musician before going to college. He studied music, film and literature at university in Prague. He moved on to become a professor at the ...

60. Jules Verne

Writer | Journey to the Center of the Earth

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) was one of the most famous French novelists of all time. His major work is the "Extraordinary Journeys", a series of more than sixty adventure novels including "Journey to the Center of the Earth", "Around the World in 80 Days", "20.000 Leagues under the Seas" and "...

61. Mark Twain

Writer | Big River

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri in 1835, grew up in Hannibal. He was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Throughout his career, Twain served as a writer, lecturer, reporter, editor, printer, and prospector. Twain took his pen name from an alert cry used on his...

62. Francois Rabelais

Writer | Kraft Television Theatre

François Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He is primarily known as a writer of satire, of the grotesque, and of bawdy jokes and songs. Ecclesiastical and anticlerical, Christian and considered by some as a free thinker, a doctor and ...

63. Yasar Kemal

Writer | Alageyik

Yasar Kemal was born on October 6, 1923 in Osmaniye, Adana, Turkey. He was a writer, known for Лань (1958), Tus (1955) and The Enemy of Chastity (1957). He was married to Ayse Semiha Baban and Thilda Serrero. He died on February 28, 2015 in Istanbul, Turkey.

64. George Bernard Shaw

Writer | My Fair Lady

The Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, acquired a reputation as the greatest dramatist in the English language during the first half of the 20th Century for the plays he had written at the height of his creativity from "Mrs. ...

65. Arthur Conan Doyle

Writer | Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle was a British writer of Irish descent, considered a major figure in crime fiction. His most famous series of works consisted of the "Sherlock Holmes" stories (1887-1927), consisting of four novels and 56 short stories. His other notable series were the "Professor Challenger" ...

66. Jane Austen

Writer | Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen was born on December 16th, 1775, to the local rector, Rev. George Austen (1731-1805), and Cassandra Leigh (1739-1827). She was the seventh of eight children. She had one older sister, Cassandra. In 1783 she went to Southampton to be taught by a relative, Mrs. Cawley, but was brought ...

67. Geoffrey Chaucer

Writer | The Ribald Tales of Canterbury

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in 1343 in London, Kingdom of England [now UK]. He was a writer. He was married to Philippa Roet. He died on October 25, 1400 in London, Kingdom of England [now UK].

68. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Writer | Le Petit Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born into a family of old provincial nobility. Failing his final exams at a preparatory school, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, he began military service in the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs, and sent to Strasbourg for pilot training. The...

69. Erich Maria Remarque

Writer | A Time to Love and a Time to Die

The German novelist Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück in 1898. His first novel, the famous anti-war epic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), was written based on his experiences as a soldier in WWI, and published in 1929. He moved to Switzerland until 1939 and later emigrated to the US....

70. J.D. Salinger

Writer | My Foolish Heart

U.S. writer whose novel "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post-World War II generation of college students. His entire corpus of published works consists of that one novel and 13 short stories, all originally written in the period 1948-...

71. Virginia Woolf

Writer | Virginia Woolf's Night & Day

London-born Virginia Woolf came from a wealthy family and, unlike her brothers, received her education at home, an unusual step for the times. Her parents had both had children from previous marriages, so she grew up with a variety of siblings, stepbrothers and stepsisters. Her father was a ...

72. Louis Aragon

Soundtrack | 8 femmes

Louis Aragon was born on October 3, 1897, in Paris, France. He graduated from Lycée Carnot, then studied medicine in Sorbonne and befriended a fellow medical student André Breton . In 1917 he was drafted in the First World War and served in a military hospital. There he met Guillaume Apollinaire and...

73. Herman Melville

Writer | The Enigma of Benito Cereno

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his ...

74. Alphonse Daudet

Writer | Sapho

Alphonse Daudet was born on May 13, 1840 in Nîmes, France. He was a writer, known for Sapho (1934), Sapho (1917) and Sapho (1913). He was married to Julia Allard. He died on December 16, 1897 in Paris, France.

75. Mikhail Sholokhov

Writer | Podnyataya tselina

Mikhail Sholokhov was a Russian writer who received a Nobel prize for his epic novel 'Tikhiy Don'. He was born in 1905 into a Cossack family of farmers in Kruzhilin, Veshenskaya, Rostov province in Southern Russia. His high school studies were interrupted by the Russian revolution and the Civil War, ...

76. Stefan Zweig

Writer | The Grand Budapest Hotel

Here he grew up in the educated Jewish middle class, together with his brother Alfred. The Zweig family was not religious. He passed his high school diploma at the Wasagymnasium in Vienna. Zweig wrote his first poems here. At that time he was influenced by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannstahl and ...

77. José Saramago

Writer | Enemy

José Saramago was born on November 16, 1922 in Azinhaga, Golega, Portugal. He was a writer, known for Enemy (2013), Blindness (2008) and O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo . He was married to Pilar del Río and Ilda Reis. He died on June 18, 2010 in Lanzarote, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain.

78. Bertolt Brecht

Writer | Die Dreigroschenoper

Bertolt Brecht was born on 10 February 1898 in Augsburg, Germany and one of the country's most influential poets, playwrights and screenwriters. His most famous work was the musical "The Threepenny Opera" (with Kurt Weill ), but his dramas such as "Mother Courage and Her Children" or "The Good ...

79. Mario Vargas Llosa

Writer | Pantaleón y las visitadoras

Mario Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936 in Arequipa, Peru. He is a writer and director, known for Pantaleon (1976), Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1999) and Tune in Tomorrow... (1990). He has been married to Patricia Llosa since 1965. He was previously married to Julia Urquidi.

80. T.S. Eliot

Writer | Cats

T.S. Eliot ranks with William Butler Yeats as the greatest English language poet of the 20th Century and was certainly the most influential. He was born Thomas Stearns Eliot into the bosom of a respectable middle class family on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. The family had roots in New...

81. Guy de Maupassant

Writer | La criada de la granja

Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850 in Château de Miromesnil, France. He was a writer, known for La criada de la granja (1953), Pierre & Jeanne and Black Sabbath (1963). He died on July 6, 1893 in Paris, France.

82. John Keats

Writer | Camera Three

John Keats (31 October 1795 - 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, although his poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently ...

83. Sabahattin Ali

Sabahattin Ali was born in Komotini, Greece, 1917; and assassinated in Kirklareli, Turkey, 1948. He worked as a teacher in Yozgat, Aydin, Konya and Ankara for couple of years. In 1945, Ali started to publish humorous and opposing magazine Marko Pasa. He arrested in 1948 for an article and sentenced...

84. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Soundtrack | Neredesin Firuze

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar was born on June 23, 1901 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]. He was a writer, known for Где ты, Фируза? (2004), A Passing Summer's Rain (1994) and Geçmis Zaman Elbiseleri (1975). He ...

85. John Fante

Writer | Full of Life

John Fante was born on April 8, 1909 in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He was a writer, known for Full of Life (1956), The Golden Fleecing (1940) and My Man and I (1952). He was married to Joyce H. Smart. He died on May 8, 1983 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

86. Henri-Frédéric Blanc

Writer | Combat de fauves

Henri-Frédéric Blanc is known for Wild Games (1997), Le Dernier Survivant (2001) and Jeu de massacre ou le blues des fadas (1996).

87. Isaac Asimov

Writer | I, Robot

Isaac Asimov was born Isaak Judah Ozimov, on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi shtetl, near Smolensk, Russia. He was the oldest of three children. His father, named Judah Ozimov, and his mother, named Anna Rachel Ozimov (nee Berman), were Orthodox Jews. Ozimov family were millers (the name Ozimov ...

88. Fitzgerald Scott

Writer | Young Cesar

Fitzgerald Scott is known for Young Cesar (2007) and Charlotte Church: Crazy Chick (2005).

89. J.M. Coetzee

Writer | Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee was born on February 9, 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a writer, known for Waiting for the Barbarians (2019), Dust (1985) and Disgrace (2008).

90. Kazuo Ishiguro

Writer | Living

Kazuo Ishiguro was born on November 8, 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan. He is a writer and producer, known for Living (2022), Never Let Me Go (2010) and The Remains of the Day (1993). He has been married to Lorna Anne MacDougall since 1986. They have one child.

91. Hermann Hesse

Soundtrack | The Hours

Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was a writer, known for The Hours (2002), Siddhartha (1972) and Poem: I Set My Foot Upon the Air and It Carried Me (2003). He was married to Ninon Ausländer, Ruth Wenger and Maria Bernoulli. He died on August 9, 1962 in Montagnola, ...

92. Robert Louis Stevenson

Writer | Muppet Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer from Edinburgh. His most popular works include the pirate-themed adventure novel "Treasure Island" (1883), the poetry collection "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885), the Gothic horror novella "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr ...

93. Salman Rushdie

Actor | Bridget Jones's Diary

He married the actress Padma Lakshmi , the hostess of "Padma's Passport," and dedicatee of his eighth novel, "Fury" (2001), on 17th April 2004. The late Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against him for the novel "The Satanic Verses" on 14th February 1989. He is currently completing a ninth novel....

94. Mario Vargas Llosa

95. aldous huxley.

Writer | A Woman's Vengeance

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, at Laleham in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the third of four children. His brother Julian Huxley was a biologist known for his theories of evolution. His grandfather, named Thomas Henry Huxley, was a naturalist known as "Darwin's Bulldog." His ...

96. Paul Valéry

Writer | Auf der Lesebühne der Literarischen Illustrierten

Paul Valéry was born on October 30, 1871 in Cette [now Sète], Herault, France. He was a writer, known for Auf der Lesebühne der Literarischen Illustrierten (1965), L'ippogrifo (1974) and Paul Valéry (1960). He was married to Jeannie Gobillard. He died on July 20, 1945 in Paris, France.

97. Thomas Pynchon

Writer | Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for Inherent Vice (2014), Prüfstand VII (2002) and Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of P. (2002). He has been married to Melanie Jackson since 1991. They have one child.

98. H.P. Lovecraft

Writer | Color Out of Space

Born in Providence, Lovecraft was a sickly child whose parents died insane. When he was 16, he wrote the astronomy column in the Providence Tribune. Between 1908 and 1923, he wrote short stories for Weird Tales magazine, among others. He died in Providence, in poverty, on March 15, 1937. His most ...

99. Haruki Murakami

Writer | Doraibu mai kâ

Haruki Murakami graduated from Waseda University, Tokyo, in 1975. Widely considered one of Japan's most important 20th-century novelists. His often solitary, withdrawn, and world-weary protagonists are generally stripped of Japanese tradition. Frequently called postmodern, his fiction, which often ...

100. Nikos Kazantzakis

Writer | The Last Temptation of Christ

Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion, Crete (Greece). He studied Law in Athens and in Paris, but soon he studied philosophy and literature. He travelled almost everywhere; he learnt many foreign languages and left his scientific research for Nitsche. At philosophy: "Ascetics" (Salvatores Dei, ...

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Emily Martin

Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over at #BookSquadGoals (www.booksquadgoals.com). She can be reached at [email protected].

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What a time to be alive! To be fair, there’s a lot that could be better about the world right now, but there is one major thing we have going for us right now: We have lots of incredible books to read from some truly noteworthy authors. But who are the top authors and what books are contemporary readers loving the most? I want to break it down for you with this list of the 15 top authors.

So with all the myriad ways readers show their support for their most beloved authors online, how did I come to make this final list? Just to keep the research a little more focused, I stuck with Goodreads stats of various kinds. First of all, I looked at the list of authors who are the most followed on Goodreads. From there, I cross-referenced this list with the list of books that are most read and the most shelved on any given year, starting in 2021 and going back to 2016, just to keep the list current to what people have been reading the most over the past five years or so.

From there, what I got was this scientifically proven (disclaimer: none of this is scientifically proven) list of the top authors of our time (disclaimer again: our time being 2016–2021). Note that this is just one methodology for finding the top current authors. This methodology is less based on the quality of writing and more based on the popularity of the author and their books. But popularity has merit, I say! And it’s worth considering.

“Get on with the list,” you say? Okay, I hear you. Without any further messing around, here’s a list of the 15 top authors, based on Goodreads stats, ranked from 15th place to 1st place. Enjoy!

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas cover

15 – Angie Thomas

Angie Thomas is a young adult author who is most well-known for her 2017 novel The Hate U Give . The novel debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller List and went on to win several awards, including The William C. Morris Award, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, and Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. In 2021, Thomas wrote a prequel to The Hate U Give, entitled Concrete Rose . This year, she also co-authored a novel called Blackout with Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon.

cover image of Verity by Colleen Hoover

14 – Colleen Hoover

Colleen Hoover is a notable author on this list because she is the first author to ever write a self-published novel that made it to #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers List. That novel was Hopeless , but the novel Hoover is probably best-known for now is Verity , which you’ve probably seen all over BookTok. Colleen Hoover is a popular author across social media, especially Goodreads, where she’s won multiple Goodreads Choice Awards, in 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2016. Every single one of her full-length novels since 2021 have been best sellers.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

13 – Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is an author who writes across several genres, including short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, and films. Gaiman has won several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards. He is also the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same book, The Graveyard Book . It’s hard to choose one book of Gaiman’s that is the most popular because all of his novels have their fans, but American Gods is one of Gaiman’s best-selling works and has won multiple awards.

da vinci code cover

12 – Dan Brown

Dan Brown writes thriller/mystery novels that explore conspiracy theories, cryptography, and art. Brown’s novels have sold over 200 million copies. He is best known for his Robert Langdon book series, which dives deep into religious themes and history. Three out of five of the Robert Langdon novels have been adapted into films: The Da Vinci Code , Angels and Demons , and Inferno . And in 2021, Brown’s novel The Lost Symbol was adapted into a television series. Dan Brown has also donated millions of dollars in support of scholarship.

Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead book cover

11 – Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead is an author who is the recipient of many awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2002. His 2016 novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Underground Railroad was also recently adapted into a television series on Amazon, so that would explain the resurgence of interest in this book on Goodreads. Whitehead’s 2020 novel The Nickel Boys won him another Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. So yes, the hype is real.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Ocean Vuong Novel

10 – Ocean Vuong

The year 2019 was big for poet and author Ocean Vuong. It was the year his debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was released, and it was the year he received a MacArthur Genius Grant. But in 2021, Vuong is still going strong with readers on Goodreads, and it looks like he will be for years to come. Last year, it was announced that Vuong would be the seventh author to contribute to the Future Library Project , a collection of works by contemporary authors that will remain unread until 2114.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo Book Cover

9 – Taylor Jenkins Reid

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a popular contemporary author for many readers not only on Goodreads, but also on BookTube and BookTok. She is best-known for her novels The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo , Daisy Jones and the Six , and Malibu Rising . Daisy Jones and the Six, which is loosely based on the classic rock band Fleetwood Mac, is currently being adapted into an Amazon miniseries produced by Reese Witherspoon, starring Riley Keough as Daisy Jones and Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne.

Mexican Gothic cover

8 – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican Canadian author of speculative fiction. She received the Copper Cylinder Adult Award for her debut novel Signal to Noise and the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel for her 2020 novel Mexican Gothic . Garcia was also a finalist for the Nebula Award for both Gods of Jade and Shadow and Mexican Gothic, and a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Mexican Gothic. Mexican Gothic is also in development as a limited series for Hulu, produced by Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos’s Milojo Productions.

cover of the vanishing half by brit bennett, featuring several different color shapes that appear abstract at first, but are actually the overlapping faces of two women

7 – Brit Bennett

Brit Bennett went straight to The New York Times Best Seller list with her debut novel The Mothers , and she was also named in the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” list of promising debut novelists. With her second novel, The Vanishing Half , Bennett once again found herself on top of the NYT Best Sellers list, and The New York Times also chose this novel as one of its top ten best books of 2020. Now, both novels are being adapted; Kerry Washington is producing a film adaptation of The Mothers, and The Vanishing Half has been acquired by HBO for a limited series with Bennett serving as executive producer.

cover of six of crows

6 – Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo’s novels long been popular amongst Goodreads readers, but the recent Netflix adaptation of Shadow and Bone has introduced a whole new group of readers to the series and its spinoff Six of Crows (this story is also a part of the series adaptation). In 2019, Bardugo also published her first adult novel, Ninth House , a paranormal fantasy set at Yale University. Ninth House was listed in Tor’s Best Books of 2019 and Paste’s 19 Best Novels of 2019 . Both Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom were listed in Paste’s 50 Best Fantasy Books of the 21st Century (So Far) .

a court of thorns and roses

5 – Sarah J. Maas

Next up on the list is another author of a widely beloved fantasy series: Sarah J. Maas. In fact, Maas is known for not one but two fantasy series, Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses . Maas’s books have sold over 12 million copies and have been translated into 37 languages. In 2020, Maas released the first book in her new Crescent City Series, House of Earth and Blood . The next novel in the series, House of Sky and Breath , is coming in 2022. There are also more books in the Court of Thorns and Roses series in the works.

klara and the sun cover

4 – Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro is a British novelist who is known for playing with genres like speculative fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction in his literary novels. In 2017, Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature. T he Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as an author “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” His 2021 novel Klara and the Sun is his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize. His latest novel has been widely acclaimed by readers and reviewers and compared to another of Ishiguro’s beloved novels, Never Let Me Go .

cover of Divergent by Veronica Roth

3 – Veronica Roth

Veronica Roth is an author who is best-known for her young adult series Divergent , which was released in 2011–2013 and later adapted into a film series starring Shailene Woodley and Theo James. Although the Divergent novels were the first books Roth wrote and remain some of her most popular books, the author continues to write inventive fantasy stories that keep readers interested. Most recently, Roth released her first adult novel, Chosen Ones , the first novel in a fantasy duology.

Book cover for The Shining

2 – Stephen King

If you don’t know who Stephen King is, then you’ve probably been living under a rock, but just in case you’ve somehow missed it, here’s the deal with this best-selling author. Stephen King writes across many genres: horror, science fiction, fantasy, suspense, and more. King has won several awards for his works, including multiple Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, and British Fantasy Society Awards. And in 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Stephen King’s novels are all top-selling books, but if you were wondering which of King’s novels is the best-selling of all 63 of his books, it’s The Shining .

turtles all the way down book cover

1 – John Green

Is John Green who you expected to see at the top of this list? John Green has had many of his young adult novels hit The New York Times Best Sellers list, including The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down . In 2014, Green was named one of the 1 00 Most Influential People in the World by Time . Part of the reason he is so popular and consistently read by so many people on Goodreads is his involvement in creating so much online content. He and his brother Hank Green are big YouTubers, and John Green also has a podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed , which was adapted into a book of essays.

And there you have it! Hopefully some of the people on these list ended up being surprises to you. I have to say I was a little surprised at how it all shook out, but you can’t argue with science (disclaimer: this still isn’t science)!

Love lists where we talk about the best of the best? Here are 20 of the best children’s authors . And if horror’s more your speed, here’s a totally scientific list of the best horror authors of all time !

famous authors of books

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10 of the Best Historical Fiction Books About Books

26 Famous Authors' Favorite Books

By sonia weiser | may 17, 2019, 6:00 pm edt.

David Cheskin-Pool/Getty Images

One key to being a good writer is to always keep reading—and that doesn't stop after you've been published. Here are 26 authors' favorite reads. Who knows, one of these books might become your new favorite.

1. ERNEST HEMINGWAY

famous authors of books

Papa Hemingway once said "there is no friend as loyal as a book," and in a 1935 piece published in Esquire , he laid out a list of a few friends he said he would "rather read again for the first time ... than have an assured income of a million dollars a year." They included, he wrote, " Anna Karenina , Far Away and Long Ago , Buddenbrooks , Wuthering Heights , Madame Bovary , War and Peace , A Sportsman's Sketches , The Brothers Karamazov , Hail and Farewell , Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Winesburg, Ohio , La Reine Margot , The Maison Tellier , Le Rouge et le Noir , La Chartreuse de Parme , Dubliners , Yeats's Autobiographies , and a few others."

It wasn't the first reading list he'd made; just a year earlier, Hemingway had dashed off a list of 14 books for an aspiring writer who had hitchhiked to Florida to meet him. It included a few of the same books above, plus two short stories by Stephen Crane .

2. JOAN DIDION

famous authors of books

In an interview with The Paris Review in 2006, novelist and creative nonfiction scribe Joan Didion called Joseph Conrad's Victory "maybe my favorite book in the world ... I have never started a novel ... without rereading Victory . It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing."

3. RAY BRADBURY

famous authors of books

Sci-fi author Ray Bradbury's favorite books, which he discussed during a 2003 interview with Barnes & Noble when he was 83, are somewhat unexpected. Among them, Bradbury said, were "The collected essays of George Bernard Shaw, which contain all of the intelligence of humanity during the last hundred years and perhaps more," books written by Loren Eisley , "who is our greatest poet/essayist of the last 40 years," and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick : "Quite obviously its impact on my life has lasted for more than 50 years."

The books that most influenced his career—and are presumably favorites as well—were those in Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter: Warlord of Mars series. "[They] entered my life when I was 10 and caused me to go out on the lawns of summer, put up my hands, and ask for Mars to take me home," Bradbury said. "Within a short time I began to write and have continued that process ever since, all because of Mr. Burroughs."

4. GEORGE R.R. MARTIN

famous authors of books

It's probably not surprising that Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has said that J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , which he first read in junior high, is "still a book I admire vastly." But he recently found inspiration in a newer book, which he recommended in a Live Journal entry : "I won't soon forget Station Eleven ," he wrote. Emily St. John Mandel's book about a group of actors in a recently post-apocalyptic society, he said, is "a deeply melancholy novel, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac … a book that I will long remember, and return to."

5. AYN RAND

famous authors of books

"The very best I've ever read, my favorite thing in all world literature (and that includes all the heavy classics) is a novelette called Calumet K by Merwin-Webster," Rand wrote in 1945. The book was famous then, but if you haven't heard of it, allow Chicago magazine to outline the plot : " Calumet K is a quaint, endearingly Midwestern novel about the building of a grain elevator ... It's a procedural about large-scale agricultural production." If that sounds like something you'd want to check out, you can read it for free here .

6. GILLIAN FLYNN

famous authors of books

When Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn was asked about her favorite books in a 2014 Reddit AMA , she called out her "comfort food" books—the kind "you grab when you're feeling cranky and nothing sounds good to read"—which included Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song .

7. VLADIMIR NABOKOV

famous authors of books

During an interview with a French television station in the 1950s, the Lolita author —who wrote all of his own books on note cards, which were "gradually copied, expanded, and rearranged until they [became his novels]," according to The Paris Review —shared a list of what he considered to be great literature: James Joyce's Ulysses , Kafka's The Metamorphosis , Andrei Bely's Petersburg , and "the first half of Proust's fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time ."

8. JANE AUSTEN

famous authors of books

The author of classics like Pride and Prejudice and Emma was herself a voracious reader of books, poetry, and plays, including The Corsair by Lord Byron, Madame de Genlis's Olimpe and Theophile , and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe. A clear favorite , though, was Samuel Richardson's book Sir Charles Grandison .

9. MARK TWAIN

famous authors of books

In 1887, Twain responded to a letter from Reverend Charles D. Crane, a pastor in Maine, which likely asked for Twain's recommendations for both young boys and girls as well as the authors' favorite books (Crane's letter, unfortunately, is lost). Among his favorites, Twain said, were Thomas Carlyle "( The French Revolution only)," Sir Thomas Malory's King Arthur , and Arabian Nights , among others. He also included his own B.B. , which he said was "a book which I wrote some years ago, not for publication but just for my own private reading."

10. MEG WOLITZER

famous authors of books

The Interestings author loves the novel Old Filth by Jane Gardam. "It's a thrilling, bold and witty book by a British writer whom I discovered rather late," she told Elle in 2014. "I can't say I've read anything else like Old Filth , which stands out for me as a singular, opalescent novel, a thing of beauty that gives immense gratification to its lucky readers."

11. ERIK LARSON

famous authors of books

The acclaimed author of The Devil in the White City calls The Maltese Falcon his " all-time personal favorite ":

"I love this book, all of it: the plot, the characters, the dialogue, much of which was lifted verbatim by John Huston for his screenplay for the beloved movie of the same name. The single best monologue in fiction appears toward the end, when Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy why he's giving her to the police."

12. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

famous authors of books

In 1936—four years before his death—Fitzgerald was living at the Grove Park Inn in North Carolina. After he fired a gun as a suicide threat, the inn insisted that he be supervised by a nurse. While under Dorothy Richardson's care, he provided her with a list of 22 books that he deemed "essential reading." It included Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House , and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.

13. EDWIDGE DANTICAT

famous authors of books

This MacArthur Fellow and award-winning author of Claire of the Sea Light , The Dew Breaker , and Brother, I'm Dying told Time.com that her favorite summer read is Love, Anger, Madness , by the Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet. "I have read and reread that book, both in French and in its English translation, for many years now," she said. "And each time I stumble into something new and eye-opening that makes me want to keep reading it over and over again."

14. SAMUEL BECKETT

famous authors of books

Winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of Waiting for Godot , Beckett was always a private individual, even after garnering acclaim for his writing. In 2011, a volume of the author's letters from 1941 to 1956 was published, giving the world a glimpse into his friendships and reading habits. Beckett wrote about many books in his correspondence: He described Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne as "lively stuff," wrote that his fourth reading of Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane caused "the same old tears in the same old places," and that he liked The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger "more than anything for a long time."

15. R.L. STINE

famous authors of books

In a 2012 piece for The Washington Post , Goosebumps and Fear Street author R.L. Stine praised Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine , calling it "one of the most underrated books ever. Bradbury's lyrical depiction of growing up in the Midwest in a long-ago time, a time that probably never even existed, is the kind of beautiful nostalgia few authors have achieved."

16. AMY TAN

famous authors of books

The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan's favorite piece of classic Chinese literature is Jing Ping Mei ( The Plum in the Golden Vase ), penned by an anonymous scribe. "I would describe it as a book of manners for the debauched," she said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times . "Its readers in the late Ming period likely hid it under their bedcovers, because it was banned as pornographic. It has a fairly modern, naturalistic style—'Show, don't tell'—and there are a lot of sex scenes shown. For years, I didn't know I had the expurgated edition that provided only elliptical hints of what went on between falling into bed and waking up refreshed. The unexpurgated edition is instructional."

17. J.K. ROWLING

famous authors of books

For her favorite book, Harry Potter and The Silkworm author J.K. Rowling (she wrote the latter under a pseudonym) went with a classic: Jane Austen's Emma . "Virginia Woolf said of Austen, 'For a great writer, she was the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness,' which is a fantastic line," Rowling said , according to Oprah.com. "You're drawn into the story, and you come out the other end, and you know you've seen something great in action. But you can't see the pyrotechnics; there's nothing flashy."

One of her favorite books as a child was The Story of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit, whom Rowling called "the children's writer with whom I most identify … The Story of the Treasure Seekers was a breakthrough children's book. Oswald is such a very real narrator, at a time when most people were writing morality plays for children."

18. MAYA ANGELOU

famous authors of books

The poet and author had a number of favorite books, including Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities , the Bible, Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women . "When I read Alcott, I knew that these girls she was talking about were all white," Angelou told The Week in 2013 . "But they were nice girls and I understood them. I felt like I was almost there with them in their living room and their kitchen."

19. LYDIA DAVIS

famous authors of books

Reading John Dos Passos's Orient Express was "a turning point for me," award winning novelist Lydia Davis said in 1997 . "That was one of the first 'grown up' books that made me excited about the language."

20. HENRY MILLER

famous authors of books

The Tropic of Cancer author wrote an entire book that, he explained in the preface, "[dealt] with books as a vital experience." The Books in My Life included an appendix titled "100 Books Which Influenced Me Most." Classics like Wuthering Heights , Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Les Miserables , and Leaves of Grass all made the cut.

21. JOHN STEINBECK

famous authors of books

One of the Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden author's favorite books later in life was Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio , but his first favorite book was Le Morte d'Arthur , a collection of Arthurian tales by Sir Thomas Malory, which Steinbeck received as a gift when he was 9 . It was a major influence on the author's writing, and ultimately led to The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights , which Steinbeck hoped would be "the best work of my life and the most satisfying." He had completed just seven chapters of the book when he died in 1968; it was published posthumously eight years later.

22. CHERYL STRAYED

famous authors of books

When the author of the bestselling memoir Wild set off on her journey up the Pacific Coast Trail, she only had room to take two books. One was a book of Adrienne Rich's poetry , The Dream of a Common Language . She had already read it enough times to almost memorize it in its entirety. Explaining in Wild the choice to bring along the extra weight in her pack, she writes:

"In the previous few years, certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I'd chanted to myself through my sorrow and confusion. That book was a consolation, an old friend, and when I held it in my hands on my first night on the trail, I didn't regret carrying it one iota—even though carrying it meant that I could do no more than hunch beneath its weight. It was true that The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California was now my bible, but The Dream of a Common Language was my religion."

At one point during her arduous hike, she considers burning the book to save weight in her pack, as she did with other books she read along the trail. "There was no reason not to burn this book too," she writes. "Instead, I only hugged it to my chest."

23. JOYCE CAROL OATES

famous authors of books

In a 2013 interview with The Boston Globe , the prolific author Joyce Carol Oates revealed Dostoevsky as one of her favorite authors. When asked for her all-time favorite book, she said:

"I would say Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, which had an enormous effect on me. I think young people today might not realize how readable that novel is. The other book that I worry no one reads anymore is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's not easy, but every page is wonderful and repays the effort."

In honor of the publication of her latest book, Dis Mem Ber in June 2017, Oates also shared her current reading list with The Week . It included Anthony Marra's books A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno , Atticus Lish's award-winning Preparation for the Next Life , Whitney Terrell's Iraq War novel The Good Lieutenant , T. Geronimo Johnson's satirical Welcome to Braggsville , and the time-travel sci-fi novel Version Control by Dexter Palmer.

24. GEORGE SAUNDERS

famous authors of books

In 2014, Saunders—one of the most famous short story writers of our time—detailed some of his favorite books for Oprah Winfrey's O magazine. On the favorites list for the author of bestsellers like Tenth of December and Lincoln in the Bardo ?

Tobias Wolff's In the Garden of the North American Martyrs ( a book that convinced Saunders to study with Wolff at Syracuse University, where Saunders still works today), Michael Herr's Vietnam memoir Dispatches , Stuart Dybek's short story collection The Coast of Chicago , Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye , and several classics of Russian literature—Isaac Babel's The Red Calvary , The Portable Chekhov , and Nicolai Gogol's Dead Souls .

25. JUDY BLUME

famous authors of books

In 2016, beloved author Judy Bloom shared some of her favorite books with The Strand, a bookstore in New York City. Madeline , the classic children's book by Ludwig Bemelmans, she explained, was "the first book I fell in love with at the Elizabeth [New Jersey] public library." She wrote:

"I loved it so much I hid it so my mother would not be able to return it to the library. I thought it was the only copy in the world. To this day I feel guilty. It was the first book I bought for my daughter's library when she was born."

For professional inspiration, she turns to Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral . "It never fails to amaze me," she writes.

26. Virginia Woolf

famous authors of books

Though Virginia Woolf is famous for her critiques of James Joyce's Ulysses and Jane Austen, she often spoke of books she did admire. "I’m reading [author George Elliot's] Middlemarch with even greater pleasure than I remember,” Woolf wrote in her diary. And of William Wordsworth's Prelude, she wrote to friend Ethel Smyth, saying, "Do you know, it’s so good, so succulent, so suggestive, that I have to hoard it, as a child keeps a crumb of cake? And then people say he’s dull!"

This article first ran in 2015.

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