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Luebering: Manager and Senior Editor, Literature Rosen Educational Services Jeanne Nagle: Senior Editor Nelson Sá: Art Director Matthew Cauli: Designer Introduction by Chris Hayhurst Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The 100 most influential writers of all time / edited by J. E. Luebering.—1st ed. p. cm.—(The Britannica guide to the world’s most influential people) ISBN 978-1-61530-096-9 (eBook) 1. Authors—Biography. 2. Literature—Bio-bibliography. I. Luebering, J. E. II. Title: One hundred most influential writers of all time. PN451.A15 2010 809—dc22 [B] 2009029207 On the cover: The influence of William Shakespeare, considered the greatest dramatist of all time, has spread far and wide and transcends the ages. Getty Images Photo credits: p. 8 © www.istockphoto.com/Nick Schlax; p. 16 © www.istockphoto.com/Vetta Collection. CONTENTS Introduction 8 Homer 17 37 Aeschylus 22 Sophocles 26 Aristophanes 29 Gaius Valerius Catullus 31 Virgil 33 Imru’ al-Qays 38 Du Fu 39 al-Mutanabbī 41 Ferdowsī 42 Murasaki Shikibu 45 Rūmī46 Dante 51 83 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 William Shakespeare 80 John Donne 89 112 John Milton 93 Jean Racine 96 Aphra Behn 99 Bashō 100 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 103 Daniel Defoe 105 Jonathan Swift 108 Voltaire 111 Henry Fielding 114 Samuel Johnson 116 Johann Wolfgang 180 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 Emily Brontë 177 Walt Whitman 179 193 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 George Bernard Shaw 235 Anton Chekhov 238 290 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 Eugene O’Neill 278 307 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 Naguib Mahfouz 308 321 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 INTRODUCTION 7 Introduction 7 pen a book—any book. In it you’ll find words, of course, but look closely and you’ll also find art, Ocrafted, 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 Rūmī 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 7 Introduction 7 Perhaps a writer’s influence is determined by timeless prominence, the ability to remain relevant hundreds of years after initial publication. Several of the authors in this book fit that bill, particularly Jane Austen. Her penned explorations of everyday life in middle-class England are timeless classics primarily because her characters have many of the same foibles, and become embroiled in many of the same situations, as contemporary citizens the world over in the present day. Not only are Austen’s books required reading in many school curriculums, but the author’s works have perme- ated modern culture in a way she never could have predicted. Movies and television miniseries based on her novels have proved quite successful, and groups dedicated to the reading and discussion of Austen’s work are virtually everywhere; national and regional chapters of the Jane Austen Society dot the globe. Several authors have paid homage to Austen by writing fictionalized accounts of her life or using the themes and style of her novels as the inspi- ration for their own narratives. This ability to sway audiences so deeply, and in so many ways, a century or more after the fact is arguably the very definition of influential. Prize-winning authors, whose mastery of language and storytelling is acknowledged by prestigious literary orga- nizations, may be considered highly influential as well. Toni Morrison is the author of the books Song of Solomon, (1977) which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and Beloved (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. But Morrison’s influence extends well beyond awards and honours. In addition to her status as a best-selling author, she is also a teacher, lecturer, and activist. Her 11 7 The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time 7 work in these arenas cannot help but inform her writing. Throughout her career, Morrison has delved into black culture and the black female experience in America.