Best Writer of The World

Who are the best writers 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 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.
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,
Field Code Changed
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 Field Code Changed
profound effect on the English language: the way we use it today

Field Code Changed
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 Field Code Changed
works.
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 (About 850 BCE)
We do not know who Homer was, but that is what the ancient Greeks
called him. Scholars have debated whether there was ever a single actual
author rather than a collection of oral stories but it is now thought that such
an author existed. His defining works are The Iliad and The Odyssey. The
adventures described in these two epic poems have shaped our thinking
about the ancient Greeks – their religious and social structures – and have
profoundly influenced subsequent writers, who have used his characters in
multiple ways, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, James Joyce to Star Trek,
and several poets have adopted his verse forms. The two poems are so
vivid and detailed that we are seduced into thinking that he has written an
actual history, and to this day we quote from Homer as though we were
rehearsing actual history.
The study of Homer appeared on the school syllabus of the Roman empire
for centuries, where students copied and imitated passages. All subjects –
reading, writing, history, law, music – were approached with Homer at their
centre. All the writers of that time, including the authors of the New
Testament, will have been familiar with the details of Homer’s stories, and
their poetic styles were heavily influenced by his verse. The two epics have
become central models in world mythology. They give us an important
glimpse into early human society and show how little has changed in three
thousand years.
Portrait of Homer
All of us, whoever we may be, know something about the siege of Troy, the
Trojan Wars, the kidnapping of Helen of Troy, the heroes, Achilles and
Ajax, and the epic journey home of Odysseus (Ulysses to the Romans).
Many of the stories are with us all the time in the form of science fiction
novels, stories, films and television series. Star Trek, with its characters
who are able to become invisible, change human beings into animals and
effect so many magical tricks use the stories. They are an inspiration to
science fiction writers as they search for interesting characters with powers
beyond those of human beings.
Homer’s life may have been a mystery but his works are clear, immediate
and ever present.
Read biographies of all of the 30 greatest writers ever >> Field Code Changed
Sophocles (496-406 BCE)
Sophocles, an ancient Greek dramatist, wrote plays that have stood as a

model for tragic dramas, both by Greek and Roman writers and into the
modern age, hugely influencing the playwrights of the golden age of
Elizabethan drama in England, as well as modern dramatists.
He dramatically changed the tragic form by adding a third actor, thereby

eroding the role of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He was the
first playwright to present the fully realized psychological characters that
are the central feature of Romantic and modern tragedy.
We know almost all there is to know about the life of Sophocles – much
more than we know about the more modern Elizabethan playwrights. That
is because he was not an anonymous writer but also a public figure who
served on the Board of Generals, a committee that controlled the civil and
military affairs of Athens, and also he was at one point director of the
Treasury.
His immortality is due to his writing, however. He was deeply immersed in
the theatre, and he transformed drama into something like it exists today.
As he grew up he was already famous as a child and youth in Athens for
his beauty and stunning intelligence. His family was wealthy so he enjoyed
the privileges available to favoured Greeks. He took up acting and, like
another actor, William Shakespeare, began writing plays. His first play won
the playwriting competition at the Dionysia theatre festival, beating
Aeschylus himself.
Portrait of Sophocles
Continuing to write plays he wrote more than 120. Every play he entered in
competitions won either first or second prize. Unfortunately only seven of
Sophocles’ plays have come down to us, but those seven have been
recognised as being head and shoulders above the very rich collection of
Greek dramas. One of the plays, Oedipus the King is not only his most
famous but also arguably the greatest Greek drama. Electra is just about
equally famous. Two of his plays, Antigone and The Women of Trachis are
famous for having fully rounded female characters in the way that appeals
to the modern taste where psychological drama tops the bill in popular
theatre.
 Shakespeare Field Code Changed
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70 BCE – 19 BCE)
Virgil was a prolific Roman poet, best remembered for his epic, Aeneid. He
Was to Rome what Homer was to Greece. The national epic of ancient
Rome, Aeneid follows the fortunes of the Trojan refugee, Aeneas. It is the
mythical story of the founding of Rome, a story that has given us our idea
of that event and the history of Rome before the modern period. It has
been, and is still, used by writers as the basis of Western history and
values The long lasting impact of the Aeneid, is mainly because of the
coincidence of events in political and literary history at the time of its writing
in the 20s BCE when the first Roman emperor, Augustus, established his
regime after the defeat of Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE. Virgil
tells the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas, legendary ancestor of the
Romans and, more particularly, of the family of Julius Caesar, of which
Augustus was a member.
Aeneas flees from his home city Troy, sacked by the Greeks at the end of
the Trojan War, to Italy, where founds a new city, to be followed in time by
the foundation of Rome. The Aeneid is an epic about origins and roots, a
charter myth both for the city of Rome and for the foundation of the
Augustan dynasty, the Roman Empire that would survive until the sack of
Rome in 410 CE, to be revived in the thousand-year long Holy Roman
Empire which lasted from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 CE until its
abolition by Napoleon. The Augustan regime was also a model for the other
empires of the future. The Aeneid also presents a model for later epics, in
modern European languages, celebrating kings and emperors, or tracing
legendary and historical foundations. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, drawing
on the British legend of King Arthur, is a Virgilian poem, both celebrating
the British empire and drawing attention to its flaws.
Portrait of Virgil
T. S. Eliot called the Aeneid ‘the classic of all Europe’, and suggested that
‘Virgil acquires the centrality of the unique classic; he is at the centre of
European civilization, in a position which no other poet can share or usurp.’
Seamus Heaney had a profound relationship with the poetry of Virgil. In his
last collection of poems, Human Chain (2010), the sequence ‘Route 110’ is
an adaptation of Aeneas’ journey through the Underworld, into Heaney’s
own journey.
Evangelist, Mark (1st Century CE)
The identity of Mark is unknown but his great book, The Gospel of St Mark,
was written in about the year 70 and has had the greatest impact on the
world of any book ever written. It has been translated into more languages
than any other book in history, as a book of the Bible. It is the first written
story of Jesus of Nazareth, a Middle Eastern itinerant rabbi who preached,
healed the sick and exorcised demons, caught the attention of the Jewish
establishment and was crucified on a Roman cross, thereafter rising from
the dead and becoming a god. Originally a character in a work of fiction
Jesus has been taken as an historical person and was worshiped by
increasing numbers, and is still worshiped as the God, creator of the
universe, by billions of Christians around the world.
Before the introduction of Jesus of Nazareth into written literature as a

character he existed in the letters of the evangelist, Paul, as a vague
unrealised figure with no details of his life, and probably also in oral
accounts that circulated in the early Christian community. Mark invented
the actual character of Jesus, details of the events in his life, and the drama
of his arrest, trial and execution at the hands of the Romans. Later writers,
Matthew and Luke, copied Mark’s story and added further details of their
own. Another writer of the turn of the first/second centuries, known as John,
also based his more spiritual account on the broad thrust of Mark’s book.
Those four books are collected in the New Testament and are known as
the gospels.
Portrait of Saint Mark The Evangelist
If it were influence alone that makes a writer great Mark would be placed
right at the top of the list. The protagonist of his book has not only been
seen as a person in real history, even without any evidence of that, but has
been, and is, worshiped as though he actually rose from the dead after his
execution and assumed his place as the deity who created the universe.
That belief still exists among billions of Christians and has conditioned the
world as it is today.
Mark’s gospel is not only the most influential book ever written but it is a
great work of art, carefully constructed and ending with the beautiful,
moving drama of the execution of a noble and innocent hero, a drama
which hundreds of great works of literature have echoed and continue to
echo.

Dante (Durante degli Alighieri) (1265-1321)
Dante was an Italian poet. His most famous and acclaimed poem is the
long narrative, The Divine Comedy, the story of the narrator’s journey
through hell and purgatory to paradise. It impacts on modern life in that its
picture of what hell is like, with its ice and sulphurous fire, where sinners
are tortured in the most horrific way, is the image Western culture has of
hell. It is the picture of eternal torture that was painted by the Catholic
Church for centuries.
Similarly, his purgatory and paradise have become the fixed image of what
those places are like and, in fact, have until recently been taught by some
religions as though they were real rather than fictional places. In some
Christian sects they are still taught as the places invented by Dante.
Dante portrait
Dante is considered to have had one of the greatest literary minds in the
whole history of world literature. It is a popular view that if one were to
choose one other ‘modern’ (as opposed to ‘ancient’) writer that is in the
same class as Shakespeare it would be Dante. Apart from everything else,
he did for the modern Italian language what Shakespeare did for modern Field Code Changed
English. At a time when it was thought that any serious work of literature
had to be written in Latin he was a fierce defended of the vernacular and
wrote even The New Life and The Divine Comedy in the Tuscan dialect.
The use of the dialects of the areas where the writer lived subsequently
became acceptable in Italy and resulted in the work of other great Italian
writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio.
Dante has therefore been called ‘the father of the Italian language.’ He was
actually the one who coined the word ‘Italian’ to describe the vernacular of
Italy. Before that, people just grew up talking their local dialect without
reflecting on what language it was they were speaking, and, if educated
and well-born, people mixed with those from other areas and used Latin as
the common language. And everything written was in Latin.
Like Shakespeare’s, too, Dante’s influence has spread to global

proportions. His representations of hell, purgatory and heaven have been
an inspiration for a huge amount of Western art of all kinds and have
inspired such writers as Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Field Code Changed
many others, as well as painters and composers. Field Code Changed
Geoffrey Chaucer 1343-1400

Geoffrey Chaucer stands as the great giant of English poetry. His verse is
still read and enjoyed today and often adapted for theatre performances. It
is full of characters, still recognisable as types we encounter in daily life in
spite of having been inspired by people Chaucer observed more than
seven hundred years ago.
There is a freshness in Chaucer’s poetry. His characters act their lives out
in every conceivable human situation from the deeply serious to the crude,
belly laughing comical. His stories are both funny and thought-provoking:
people caught in sexual mix-ups; two young knights fighting to the death for
the love of a beautiful young woman; a badly behaved young knight
travelling the country on a desperate quest to find the answer to a question
that will save his life and learning a great lesson; the tragic love story of
Tristan the son of the Trojan king, and the beautiful young Isolde; young
wives giving their old husbands the slip to sleep with handsome young
suitors. The list of human tales goes on indefinitely, and all of them still
appealing to the modern reader. If a writer can connect with a readership
seven centuries after his death he is most certainly a great writer.
Geoffrey Chaucer led an eventful, exciting life, by any standards. He is

known to us as a poet and, indeed, he has the distinction of being the first
poet to be buried in poet’s corner in Westminster Abbey, but that was, to
him, not much more than an interest. He was an immensely, multi, talented
man with a long and very successful full-time career as a diplomat. He was
also a philosopher, astronomer and alchemist.
In his own time Chaucer would have been far better known as a diplomat
than a poet. He was greatly valued by Edward III. During the Hundred
Years War, Chaucer was on a mission to Rhiems in 1360, when he was
captured. The King paid a £16 ransom, which was worth a few hundred
thousand dollars in today’s currency, to get him back.
Geoffrey Chaucer portrait
Chaucer was deeply immersed in public life and he established a family

tradition of that, his son, Thomas rising to distinguished heights, including
the position of Speaker of the House of Commons.
While pursuing his career, Chaucer was writing his poems and reading
them aloud at court, no doubt amid great laughter. His most famous work is
The Canterbury Tales, a series of fictional tales related by pilgrims on their
way to Canterbury, and part of its fame and importance is that it was
revolutionary as an English literary work. It is not only written in vernacular
English but its characters talk in a naturalistic way, according to their class
and background – something unknown in English literature until this
moment. The narrators of the stories talk in a way fitted to their characters
and states of life rather than in stylised conventional language. Readings of
such verse would have been immensely engaging and the language
offered opportunities for humour. Chaucer had many jobs during his life –
soldier, messenger, valet, administrator, clerk etc. – and had observed
colleagues in all of these areas, allowing him to portray them convincingly
in his tales.
Chaucer’s influence on English literature is one thing; he also had an

enormous influence on the development of the English language. This is
clear when one looks at other English texts of his time, which are almost
unrecognisable as English while his are fairly easily comprehensible to the
modern reader. In using language the way he did he pointed the way
forward.
Read more about England’s top writers >> Field Code Changed
Francois Rabelais (1494 – 1553)
Francois Rabelais was a French monk and physician who wrote several
volumes of a huge novel, The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, a story
about a giant and his son. Satirical, amusing and over-the- top, it has
influenced the style of writers like James Joyce, Lawrence Sterne and
almost any writer who has attempted novels or plays containing the
adventures of comical characters, including Shakespeare.
Rabelais was the first great prose author. He surprises one with the
‘modernity’ of his style and preoccupations while at the same time writing
within the traditions of medieval literature.
One of the things that makes Rabelais an important and influential writer is
that, in his writing we see the evolution of the humanist thinking that was to
make writers like Cervantes and Shakespeare such powerful
representatives of Renaissance literature, both to a large extent influenced
by Rabelais. There are few writers in the history of literature who have had
such an influence on later writers as had Rabelais.
Francois Rabelais portrait
In the four books of The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais’

purpose was to entertain his educated readers with the follies,
overindulgences and exaggerations of his times. Such things as the evils of
a corrupt monasticism, the profuse litigation of crooked lawyers, the
ignorance and deceit of greedy physicians, are the subjects of the work.
Rabelais was a friar and able to observe monastic life first hand; his father
had been led on by lawyers to waste his money on a long case with a
neighbour over some trivial water rights and, as a surgeon himself,
Rabelais saw at close quarters how thin the line was between genuine
physician and quack. Rabelais’ masterpiece, like Cervantes’ Don Quixote,
is full of amusing incidents. It begins in a lighthearted way and continues
with some belly-laugh events but, also like Don Quixote, it is a serious work
– a quest for the genuine inner life.
Rabelais’ lasting influence has nothing to do with his view of himself as an

author. He had a view of his own times and was struck by its absurdities.
He was very much a man of his time: his heart was very much in the
Mediaeval mode but with a compelling curiosity about the new learning and
so with those two elements firmly embedded in him he married the two in
his writing. His absurd, ridiculous inventions are mediaeval in essence even
though he is mocking mediaeval acceptances. It is the mixture of all of that
that makes him an entertaining and above all, a great and wise writer.
Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Cortinas) (1547-1616)
The Spaniard, Miguel Cervantes, a contemporary of Shakespeare,

actually dying the day before the Bard, is without doubt the most important
writer in the history of the modern novel and, indeed, one of the most
important in the history of literature. His novel, Don Quixote, was written at
the beginning of the form’s development but has not been surpassed, both
in its influence and in its qualities, by subsequent novels. Moreover, it is a
bible for postmodern writers in that it displays every article of the features
used by writers of postmodern fiction.
Cervantes was a prolific writer with numerous novels and plays to his
name, but Don Quixote overshadows them all and his name is associated
almost exclusively with that one novel. It is the first modern romance or
novel, and it has served as the model for the comic novel. Humorous
scenes and episodes, mostly burlesque, abound and it’s basically satirical.
It is one of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western
World. Dostoyevsky called it ‘the ultimate and most sublime work of human Field Code Changed
thinking’.
Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes
The story is about the adventures of a Spanish nobleman, Alonso Quixano,

who is mad. He has read countless chivalric romances and comes to
imagine himself as a medieval knight who has to undo the wrongs of the
world and restore justice to it. He assumes the name Don Quixote de la
Mancha and recruits a neighbouring farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire.
As the story progresses Sancho Panza becomes a foil to Don Quixote’s
madness with his down to earth response to the knight’s fantasies. Don
Quixote misinterprets every situation he finds himself in, relating it to his
knightly story, and it is extremely funny.
The novel’s incalculable influence on subsequent writers lies in the literary

techniques Cervantes used, which have intrigued many of the most famous
of them, and which were used in some of the greatest novels in Western
culture. His techniques have been labelled by centuries of critics and so we
have words like realism, inter-textuality, meta-theatre, etc.
Almost all fiction writers today are influenced by Cervantes but some of the
more notable novels heavily influenced by Don Quixote are Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,
Alexandre’ Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de
Bergerac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise. The word
Quixotic has been coined, meaning, Possessing or acting with the desire to
do noble and romantic deeds, without thought of realism and practicality;
exceedingly idealistic – impulsive – deluded.
John Donne 1572-1631
John Donne must be one of the most interesting writers who ever lived,
both as a poet and a man. His life was a colourful adventure and his poems
are significant feats of language.
A Jacobean writer, more or less a contemporary of Shakespeare, Fletcher Field Code Changed
and Webster, but very distant from those theatre writers, both regarding his Field Code Changed
social class and his literary work, he is now regarded as the pre-eminent
poet of a type of poetry that we refer to as the ‘Metaphysical Poets.’
Donne was a man of significant talent and ability. He was born into a
Roman Catholic family at a time when being a Catholic was illegal and this
was a disadvantage to him during the first part of his life. At the age of
eleven he was entered at Hart Hall (later to become Hertford College)
Oxford, where he spent three years, and was then admitted to the
University of Cambridge where he studied for a further three years. Neither
of the colleges awarded him a degree because he was a Catholic.
In 1591 he began studying law and qualified as a lawyer. By this time he

was well known around London as Jack Donne, man about town, party-
goer and womaniser. Keen to see the world he set out and crossed Europe
and 1596 found him at Cadiz, fighting the Spanish with the Earl of Essex
and Sir Walter Raleigh.
He lived in Italy and Spain for a few years and on his return to England,
aged 25, he was appointed secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord
Keeper of the Great Seal. He moved into Egerton’s London house and
before long, fell in love with his niece, Anne More. Her father and uncle
opposed the marriage but the couple went ahead, eloped and were
married. Donne was captured and imprisoned. In a letter to Anne he
famously signed off with ‘John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.’
John Donne portrait
After his release he and Anne retired to the country where he took on work
as a lawyer and they struggled financially, raising a large family.
In 1602 Donne was elected the Member of Parliament for Brackley. It was
unpaid but it led to other things. He converted to Anglicanism, took orders
and began to build a career as an Anglican clergyman. After many plaudits
for his anti-Catholic pamphlets he ended up as the Dean of St Paul’s
Cathedral in London, where he continued until the end of his life.
During all of that he was writing his poems. He is best known for his love
poems and his religious poems, both filled with passion and enormous
energy. The love poems were written to and about his wife, whom he
adored. Any separation from her was painful and he wrote about that with
great feeling.
One of his most famous quotes, indeed, one of the most famous in the
English culture, is not from one of his poems but from a sermon from the
pulpit of St Paul’s:
‘No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent,
a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the
lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends
or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am
involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell
tolls; it tolls for thee…’
The great quality of Donne’s poems is that they speak out to and touch the
feelings of readers of all generations in the most direct way. They are not
big on imagery and there is no description. They are intellectual in that they
employ intelletual rather than natural images and they use rational
argument to develop their ideas. They use the language of something more
like mathematics than what we would expect of poetry: for example, words
like ‘thus,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘and so’ as the argument unfolds. They use as
images, the most modern discoveries in astronomy, geography, physics
and chemistry. And yet they are among the most emotionally moving
poems written in English. An example is this poem, ‘A Valediction
Forbidding Mourning’. In the poem he is saying goodbye to his wife as he
sets out on a trip. He tells her not to make a fuss, not to cry and get upset.
While he is away, he tells her, they will still be together because they are
not really separating. No, they are two parts of one person and share one
soul. He uses the image of a pair of compasses to describe this. She is the
fixed point at the centre of the circle that represents his travelling. As he
moves far away, she leans towards him, moving quietly, looking as though
she isn’t moving at all as he moves in wide sweeps, always still attached to
her. Then as he comes back she straightens up and meets him as they join
physically. What little imagery there is is sexual. And it uses the image of
the circle, which is not just mathematical but also the symbol of perfection
and ending where one begins. It’s a remarkable poem and rightly very
famous.
As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“Now his breath goes,” 1 and some say, “No.”
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
’Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears;

Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love

—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, ’cause 2 it doth remove
The thing 3 which elemented it.
But we by a love so far 4 refined,

That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips and hands 5 to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the centre sit,

Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
In his religious poems we feel that it is a real person speaking, someone of
great intellectual and emotional power. The language is also very
masculine, physical and robust. In a famous sonnet, expressing his
commitment to the eternal life Christianity offers he addresses Death
directly: ‘Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and
dreadful: for thou art not so!’
When doubting his faith he calls on God to come to his aid, using the same
tone: ‘Batter my heart three person’d God!’ His despair at finding himself in
the arms of the Devil is such that he begs God to take him by force. He
ends by saying that he will not be freed unless God rapes him.
In one of his love poems, ‘The Sunne Rising,’ annoyed at being woken so
early while he feels his night of passion has been too short he scolds the
sun:
‘Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?’
Donne’s poems were not published in his lifetime but were circulated
among his friends in manuscript form. We are fortunate enough to have
several of them but there are many that have been lost. He was revived in
the early 20th century by literary figures, including T.S. Eliot.
John Milton 1608-1674
English is often referred to as ‘the language of Shakespeare and Milton.’

Milton’s poetry has been seen as the most perfect poetic expression in the
English language for four centuries.
His most famous poem, the epic Paradise Lost is a high point of English
epic poetry. Its story has entered into English and European culture to such
an extent that the details of our ideas of heaven and hell and paradise,
Adam and Eve, Satan and his legions’ war against God, the arch angel
Gabriel and all of those Genesis characters and events, come from Milton’s
imagining of them in this poem.
Although so many of our ideas about that story come from Paradise Lost
Milton is not read much these days. He is still studied in universities that
wish to give their students a grounding in classic English poetry, however.
John Milton portrait
Paradise Lost has all the elements of Greek epic poetry, such as extended
metaphors; a hero with cosmic significance (Satan); a setting that
encompasses the whole world or, in this case, the universe; battle deeds
that go beyond normal acts of warfare; the intervention of supernatural
beings in the affairs of humans; and language that is suited to the elevated
events and the characters of the epic. Itg is this last characteristic that most
distances the modern reader from Milton’s poetry. This extract shows how
far distant the poetry is from the modern taste:
The Angel ended, and in Adams Eare

So Charming left his voice, that he a while
Thought him still speaking, still stood fixt to hear;
Then as new wak’t thus gratefully repli’d.
What thanks sufficient, or what recompence
Equal have I to render thee, Divine
Hystorian, who thus largely hast allayd
The thirst I had of knowledge, and voutsaf’t
This friendly condescention to relate
Things else by me unsearchable, now heard
With wonder, but delight, and, as is due,
With glorie attributed to the high
Creator; something yet of doubt remaines,
Which onely thy solution can resolve.
When I behold this goodly Frame, this World
Of Heav’n and Earth consisting, and compute,
Thir magnitudes, this Earth a spot, a graine,
An Atom, with the Firmament compar’d
And all her numberd Starrs, that seem to rowle
Spaces incomprehensible (for such
Thir distance argues and thir swift return
Diurnal) meerly to officiate light
Round this opacous Earth, this punctual spot,
One day and night; in all thir vast survey
Useless besides, reasoning I oft admire,
How Nature wise and frugal could commit
Such disproportions, with superfluous hand
So many nobler Bodies to create,
Greater so manifold to this one use,
For aught appeers, and on thir Orbs impose
Such restless revolution day by day
Repeated, while the sedentarie Earth,
That better might with farr less compass move,
Serv’d by more noble then her self, attaines
Her end without least motion, and receaves,
As Tribute such a sumless journey brought
Of incorporeal speed, her warmth and light.
Milton was a man of letters, and a civil servant. He was politically active – a
pamphleteer – a republican and supporter of Oliver Cromwell. Although by
the time of his death Paradise Lost was already being spoken of as the
greatest poem in the English language he died poor, as a result of his
republican views and anti-monarchist involvement.
John Bunyan (1628 – 1688)
John Bunyan was a Baptist preacher and writer. The book that has made
him a candidate for the category of one of the most influential writers is The
Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegory that has conditioned the way Christians
think about their religious life. It is a novel – the most read novel of all time
and the second most read book, the Bible being the most read. It has been
translated into more languages than any other book, apart from the bible. It
has had the biggest worldwide impact of any novel in terms of literature,
language, religion and culture.
The Pilgrim’s Progress is the most famous allegory ever written. In

allegorical literature, where people, place and object names clearly indicate
single representative meanings, the characters had hitherto been flat and
dull but in The Pilgrim’s Progress, there are now rounded characters who
are more like human beings than the paper characters of the mediaeval
and subsequent morality tales.
The allegory of Bunyan’s book tells a simple story. Christian one day finds
that he has a heavy burden on his back, representing his sins, and so, at
Evangelist’s suggestion, he goes from the City of Destruction, where he
has always lived, towards the Wicket Gate, where he will find the straight
and narrow path that will lead him to the Celestial City. Along the way he is
confronted with many hardships, dangers and obstacles but he also gets
help from others and is supported by his two companions, Faithful and
Hopeful.
Portrait of John Bunyan
Writers have over and over again used places and characters from
Bunyan’s book as titles for their novels, such as John Buchan’s Mr
Standfast and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Nineteenth Century novelists
frequently referred to The Pilgrim’s Progress in the knowledge that readers
would pick the references up and apply them to their understanding and
appreciation of the novels they were reading: writers like Charlotte Bronte,
Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and others. Field Code Changed
Bunyan’s book has added richness to the English language with phrases
like ‘Slough of Despond,’ ‘Giant Despair,’ ‘Valley of Humiliation,’ ‘Vanity
Fair,’ among others.
The Pilgrim’s Progress has always been popular with children and their
parents. For children it is an exciting read of adventure, danger, fire-
breathing fiends, deadly duels, terrifying giants, confinement in dark
dungeons and so on. For their parents it has been about teaching them
moral and religious values, using the stories and the language to make
those things easier to discuss.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet ) (1694-1778)
François-Marie Arouet (nicknamed ‘Voltaire,’) was a French philosopher,

poet, pamphleteer and fiction writer. Candide, a novel, is the work that has
lasted best, still thriving in the modern world. It is widely taught in French
schools and universities and French departments in universities worldwide.
The British literary critic, Martin Seymour-Smith, named it as one of the
hundred most influential books ever written. It is included in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World. The novel
has influenced modern writers of dark satirical humour such as Joseph
Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Terry Southern and Kurt Vonnegut. Its brand of
parody and the picaresque methods Voltaire uses have become standard
techniques of black humorists.
Voltaire was a versatile writer, writing in almost every literary form –

including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works.
He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and
pamphlets. He was an outspoken champion of liberty, at great danger to
himself. He was a staunch critic of the intolerance, religious dogma, and
French institutions of his time.
The influence of Voltaire’s writings, particular Candide, on subsequent

literature, has been profound. Some twentieth-century works influenced by
Candide are novels of dystopian science fiction, such as Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Yevgeny Field Code Changed
Zamyatin’s We.
Portrait of Voltaire
Some of the modern genres in literature have been influenced by Candide,

for example, the 20th century’s Theatre of the Absurd. The Voltaire scholar,
Hadyn Mason, cites similarities between Candide and Samuel Becket’s
Waiting for Godot. Becket has acknowledged the influence of Voltaire on
his work. Several novelists have based their novels more squarely on
Candide. It has also been made into an opera by Leonard Bernstein, and
there have been a number of films, including the 1973 the BBC featuring it
in its Play of the Month series.
Voltaire was enormously influential in the development of a modern

approach to history, demonstrating fresh ways to look at the past. His best-
known histories are The Age of Louis XIV (1751), and Essay on the
Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756). The latter traced the progress
of world civilization in a universal context and rejected both nationalism and
the Christian frame of reference that had been the tradition in history
writing. Voltaire was thefirst scholar to make a serious attempt to write the
history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks in favour of
economics, culture and political history.
Voltaire’s influence as a philosopher is incalculable. Western thinking has

been conditioned to a large extent by such of his statements as:
 ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right
to say it’
 ‘Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little,
to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom
they know nothing’
 ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him’
 ‘God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh’
…and many others that are familiar to us and whichwe use in our everyday
speech.

Jane Austen 1775 – 1817
The Jane Austen Centre’s website states: ‘Jane Austen is perhaps the best Field Code Changed
known and best loved of Bath’s many famous residents and visitors.’
One wonders at the restraint in that, considering that Jane Austen is

indisputably one of the greatest English writers – some say the greatest
after Shakespeare – and certainly the greatest English novelist and one of
the most famous English women who ever lived.
A mark of her genius is that she was there near the beginning of the novel’s
emergence as a literary form, and all of her novels, including the earliest of
them, written when she was very young, are perfectly formed. No English
novelist has since bettered them and the novel hasn’t developed much
since her definitive examples of the form. That is amazing when one thinks
about how the other art forms –painting, music, architecture – fall out of
fashion with each generation, and give way to new forms. And also when
one thinks about how many novels have been written since hers.
Jane Austen – a portrait by her sister Cassandra
One has to ask why it is that her novels have lasted and are still widely
read. One thing is certain: when one settles down with a Jane Austen novel
one can be sure that there are going to be hours of pleasure and a lot of
chuckling.
Jane Austen prods away at the social conventions of her time and how they
fashion and condition the English landed gentry, the people she socialised
with and whom she observed closely. She reveals the little preoccupations
and concerns of the ladies and the gentlemen and the young women in
those circles, and she leads us to laugh at them. Sometimes the goading is
gentle and sometimes it’s savage. And every novel tells a gripping story,
full of tension, with mysteries where we are kept waiting for their final
resolution, when everything falls into place – very much like the best
detective novels of our time.
As with Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens, the other main English

humourists, her characters are highly memorable. We all know Elizabeth
Bennett and Mr Darcy, Emma Woodhouse and Mr Knightly, and poor little
Catherine Morland. And on another level, the immortal comic characters
led by Mrs Bennett and including Sir Walter Elliot, Mr Collins, Mrs Elton and
Mr Woodhouse, among many others.
It is difficult to pin down what it is that Jane Austen does with language to
create that combination of humour and penetrating insight. It has
something to do with the way she constructs sentences – all perfectly
balanced and often with a sting in the tail, and a style of narration in which
the variety of points of view of the different characters tell the story. It is
perhaps that latter characteristic that makes her such a modern writer –
indeed, a postmodern writer – as her stories are usually told with her
pretending to be the narrator, but she is not, and we fall into the trap of
taking her narrator seriously. With that narrative style she is able to reveal
and ridicule the manners of her society.
Her novels always have a young woman at their centre – a young woman
with romantic dreams and hopes about meeting and marrying her perfect
man. The heroine always does, although only after a series of ups and
downs, near misses and multiple misunderstandings.
On the surface the novels resemble modern romantic boy-meets-girl fiction

or ‘chicklit.’ Jane Austen uses that plot but her exploration of people, their
class and their community while doing so goes very far beyond the novels
that are read for their romantic story alone.
We have an image of Jane Austen as a spinster who lived quietly with her
mother and sister and wrote her novels in semi-secrecy, hiding her pages
away if she heard anyone approaching while she was writing. Most of what
we know about her was written by family members after her death and so
we know only the sweet, quiet, ‘Aunt Jane.’ Someone with her intelligence
and sharpness must have been much more than that.
She was the daughter of George Austen, the vicar of the Anglican parish of
Steventon in Hampshire. She had six brothers and one sister, Cassandra,
to whom she was very close. The family did not have enough money to
send her to school so she was educated at home, where she read a great
deal, directed by her father and brothers Henry and James. She also
experimented with writing little stories from early childhood and one can still
read her juvenilia, which has been collected by various editors.
Jane Austen died on 18th July 1817 at the age of 41. We do not have an
accurate diagnosis of the cause of her death but medical researchers think
it may have been the rare disease, Addison’s disease of the suprarenal
glands.
Hans Christian Andersen (1806-1875)
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. One of his stories, The Emperor’s New
Clothes, is arguably the best short story ever written because of the way he
uses the form to sum up a great universal truth in just a few words. In that
story he illustrates the theme expounded by sages from Confucious and
the Buddha to Jesus of Nazareth, that the innocence of childhood shines a
light on truths that are obscured by experience.
It would not be possible to overestimate Andersen’s impact on children’s

literature. His fairy tales are translated into numerous languages and his
most famous characters, such as the little mermaid, the little match girl, and
the ugly duckling, are known all over the world. The world’s most
prestigious prize in children’s literature, the Hans Christian Andersen
Medal, is named after him, and his birthday, 2 April, is celebrated as
International Children’s Book Day.
Many children’s writers have acknowledged their debt to Andersen. His

stories have inspired subsequent children’s writers. Such classics as The
Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A.
Milne adopted the technique of making such things as toys and animals
come to life and behave like human beings. Lewis Carroll and Beatrix
Potter were two other enduring children’s writers who were influenced by
Andersen’s stories. Apart from those literary giants writers, not necessarily
children’s writers, have been influenced by Andersen – writers like Jane
Gardam and Joyce Carol Oates.
Portrait of Hans Christian Anderson
The fairy tales have been made into comic books, plays, films, operas, and
all kinds of merchandise, and even Andersen’s life has become the subject
for theatre and film. There are even Hans Christian Anderson theme parks
in the Chinese city of Shanghai and the Japanese city of Funabashi.
Among Andersen’s most famous stories are The Emperor’s New Clothes,
The Ice Maiden, The Little Mermaid, The Little Match Girl, The Nightingale,
The Princess and the Pea, The Snow Queen, The Tin Soldier, Thumbelina,
The Ugly Duckling.
Charles Dickens 1812-1870
Charles Dickens was an extraordinary man. He is best known as a novelist

but he was very much more than that. He was as prominent in his other
pursuits but they were not areas of life where we can still see him today.
We see him as the author of such classics as Oliver Twist, David
Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House and
many others. All of his novels are English classics.
Dickens had an almost unbelievable level of energy. In addition to writing

all those lengthy books in long-hand, he had time to pursue what would
have been full-time careers for most people in acting, literary editing social
campaigning and philanthropic administration. He was also the father of a
large family, as well as being involved in a love affair that lasted many
years.
He began as a journalist, writing little pieces about daily life and developed
very quickly into a best-selling novelist, avidly read throughout the English
speaking world. At the same time he was appearing in plays and touring,
reading from his novels. And editing his literary hournals, Household Words
and All the Year Round, which featured the serialisation of his novels, with
people queuing up to buy them, eager to find out how the previous episode
would be concluded.
Charles Dickens photograph
As a child Dickens saw his father imprisoned for debt and that led him to a
lifelong interest in prisons and the need for the reform of the system. Many
of his novels reveal the cold hard facts of the Victorian prison system and,
with so many readers, the novels had a great effect on the consciousness
of the public. In addition to that Dickens campaigned and lobbied for
reform.
Dickens was a man who seemed to be able to direct his efforts in several
directions and give each his full attention. He spent ten years running
Urania Cottage, a home for ‘fallen women.’ And organisation aimed at
helping the women get back to respectable life, either in England or
Australia or America. He spent his own money on the project and gave it
his full attention.
It is difficult to imagine English culture without the characters who inhabit

Dickens’ novels. Just a mention of the name ‘Miss Havisham,’ brings up the
image of someone embittered and socially marginalised, living in an unreal
world that has stopped turning. ‘Mr Gradgrind’ creates the image of
inflexibility and Mr McCawber the delusional optimist, always relying on his
cheerful belief that something will turn up to solve his problems, makes us
shake our heads with a mixture of amusement and pity.
Where would English culture be if there had been no Fagin, no Oliver

Twist, no Ebenezer Scrooge? What graphic image would we have of a
fawning, writhing, hypocritical functionary without Uriah Heep springing into
our minds? And what about the pompous Mr Bumble and the cruel, cold-
hearted Mr Murdstone and his iron sister, Miss Murdstone? The list of
Dickens characters who have embedded themselves firmly in English
culture is endless.
Dickens’ novels, which lend themselves to dramatisation for stage,
television and film, are delightful to read and several are regarded as the
greatest of English novels. Indeed, Bleak House is acclaimed by critics as
being among the greatest of world novels, in the same category as
Huckleberry Finn, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Pride and
Prejudice and Moby Dick.
Herman Melville (1819 – 1891)
Herman Melville was an American writer of novels, short stories and

poems. He is best known for the novel Moby-Dick and a romantic account
of his experiences in Polynesian life, Typee. His whaling novel, Moby-Dick
is often spoken of as ‘the great American novel’ ’vying with Scott Fitgerald’s
The Great Gatsby and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for that title.
Melville was the master of dense and complex prose, rich in mystical
imagery and packed with allusions to philosophy, myth, scripture, visual
arts and other literary works. His themes go deep into the human condition:
he explores such things as the impossibility of finding enough common
ground for human communication. His characters are all preoccupied with
the quest for that; his plots describe that pursuit and all his themes and
ideas are related to it.
His preoccupation with the limits of knowledge led him to the question of
God’s existence in his writing, to the indifference of nature and the problem
of evil. It is in Moby-Dick that all his thematic obsessions meet, resulting in
a great book that goes to the very heart of all those preoccupations. An
emerging field of American legal scholarship known as ‘law and literature’
uses Melville’s novel Billy Budd as one of its central texts. In the novel the
popular young sailor, Billy, accused of spurious crimes, including mutiny,
accidentally kills the ship’s master-at-arms and the Captain, Edward Vere,
convenes a court martial. He urges the court to convict and sentence Billy
to death. That fictional court martial has become the focus of scholarly
controversy. What kind of man was Captain Vere? Was he a good man
caught up in bad law or did he deliberately distort and misrepresent the law
to bring about Billy’s death? There is no answer to that and so the novel
has become a clear example of Melville’s quest for the impossible, which
we see in all his work.
Herman Melville portrait
Melville spent twice as many years devoting himself to writing poetry as he

did to writing prose and although he wasn’t highly rated as a poet during his
lifetime he is now. Some critics now regard him as the first American
modernist poet. Robert Penn Warren championed Melville as a ‘great
American poet.’ The critic, Helen Vendler, writing about the poem, Clarel,
commented: ‘What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause,
reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called “the
belated funeral flower of fame”.
In 2010 a species of extinct giant sperm whale, Livyatan melvillei, was

named in honor of Melville. The paleontologists who discovered the fossil
were fans of Moby-Dick and dedicated their discovery to its author.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist, journalist, short

story writer, philosopher and essayist. His literary works explore
psychology in the political, social, and spiritual turmoil of 19th-century
Russia. His writings reveal a wide range of philosophical and religious
themes.
Dostoyevsky is best known for the novels, The Brothers Karamasov, The
Idiot, and above all, Crime and Punishment. He has left his mark, still
strong a century and a half after his death, on the world of Russian
literature with a multitude of scholars studying his works. Russian websites
are dominated by discussions about Dostoyevsky. Visitors to St Petersburg
find a Dostoyevsky site related either to his life or the settings of his novels
around every corner.
One of the reasons for Dostoyevsy’s enduring cultural importance is that he

addressed aspects of Russian life in his time, which were no less relevant
to the Soviet Russia to come and, now again, in twenty-first century Russia.
He prophesied the totalitarianism of the Soviet period. Many of the social
problems that preoccupied him and ran strongly through his philosophical,
essay and fictional writing are still of concern in modern Russia – the
issues of poverty, crime, gambling, alcoholism, family disintegration, child
abuse. Those were his recurrent themes.
Photograph of Fyodor Dostoyevski
On reading Dostoyevsky today the reader is struck by his far-reaching

insights, his preoccupation with concerns that are very much with us today
– terrorism, the clash between the Christian and Muslim worlds and the big
question of where Russia is going, of how Russia will end up. Theatrical
productions and various exhibitions based on Dostoyevsky’s life and works
are regularly presented in Russia’s museums and other cultural institutions.
The Dostoyevsky Memorial Museum in St Petersburg is arguably the most Field Code Changed
popular literary museum in Russia. Dostoyevsky walking tours of St

Petersburg are among the most popular tours of the city. There have been
numerous films and television adaptations of his novels, frequently
transplanted in time and place. Rob Schmidt’s Crime and Punishment in
Suburbia (2000), for example reworked Dostoevsky’s novel in a
contemporary American setting.
The breadth of Dostoyevsky’s scope means that there are always new
opportunities for interpretation from which to approach him, so that he is
not likely to go out of fashion. Indeed, the past two decades have seen
Dostoevsky studies flourish as they have never done before.
ules Verne (1828-1905)
Jules Verne was a French poet, playwright and novelist but he earns his
place on this list of great writers because of his futuristic adventure novels.
He has been called the father of science fiction and has had an incalculable
influence on the development of science fiction writing. More interesting,
perhaps, is his place as a prophet or predictor of technology which wasn’t
to be invented until long after his death. He put a man on the moon,
including its launch from a Florida launchpad to its splashdown in the
Pacific; in 1863 he predicted the internet: Paris in the 20th Century (1863)
depicts the details of modern life: skyscrapers, television, Maglev trains,
computers, and a culture preoccupied with the Internet. Verne’s various
novels predict world wars, weapons of mass destruction, chemical warfare,
and the rise of a charismatic German madman intent on world domination.
Verne is one of the world’s most translated authors: his works have been
translated into more than 140 languages. A number of films have been
made from his novels, starting in 1916 with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
and The Mysterious Island, From the Earth to the Moon, Journey to the
Center of the Earth, and, the most famous, Around the World in 80 Days.
Jules Verne’s influence extends to the world of science and technology,

where he inspired generations of scientists, inventors, and explorers. In
1954 the United States Navy launched the world’s first nuclear-powered
submarine, named Nautilus, the submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea. In the 20th and 21st centuries, adventurers like Nellie Bly, Wiley Post,
Richard Branson and Steve Fossett have been inspired by Verne’s fictional
hero Phileas Fogg by attempting to circumnavigate the globe in record-
breaking times.
Portrait of Jules Verne
Verne’s novels have had a wide influence on scientific and philosophical

works as well as on fiction writers. Writers known to have been influenced
by Verne include Michel Butor, Blaise Cendrars, Roland Barthes, Marcel
Ayme, Rene Barjavel, Jean Cocteau, Antoine Saint- Exupery, Jean-Paul
Satre and Wernher von Braun. The science fiction author, Ray Bradbury,
speaking for literature and science throughout the world, wrote: ‘We are all,
in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.’
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian novelist. There is a large

degree of consensus that his two great novels, War and Peace and Anna
Karenina stand on the summit of realist fiction. He has been mentioned
again and again as the greatest novelist who ever wrote, and so he wins a
place in this list of great writers. He is one of the two giants of Russian
literature. The other giant, Dostoyevsky, spoke of him as the greatest of all
living novelists.
The French giant, Gustave Flaubert, on reading War and Peace, Field Code Changed
exclaimed, ‘What an artist and what a psychologist!’ Matthew Arnold, the

British poet and man of letters, wrote: ‘a novel by Tolstoy is not a work of
art but a piece of life.’
War and Peace is generally considered to be one of the greatest – if not

the greatest – novels ever written. Its dramatic breadth and unity is
breathtaking. It is a huge canvas that includes 580 characters, some
historical, like Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia, and others fictional.
The story is set in the homes of families, the camp of Napoleon, the
Russian royal court and the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. The
novel explores the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and
Alexander.
Portrait of Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy attempts in his novels realistically to depict the Russian society in

which he lived and he draws from all its sectors. The Cossacks describes
Cossack life in a story of a Russian aristocrat who falls in love with a
Cossack girl. Anna Karenina is the story of an adulterous woman trapped
by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner
who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to transform their
lives.
It goes without saying that Toystoy’s influence on subsequent writers has

been immense. Apart from that, though, he has even influenced the course
of history. In 1908, he wrote A Letter to a Hindu outlining his belief in non-
violence as a means for India to gain independence from British colonial
rule. Gandhi read a copy of the letter when he was working as a lawyer in
South Africa and just becoming an activist. Tolstoy’s letter was most
significant for him. He wrote Tolstoy and that led to further correspondence
between them. It was Tolstoy’s influence that led to Gandhi to espouse
nonviolent resistance, the approach that won independence for India.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
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 civilisation.
After she died her sister found the almost two thousand poems the poet
had written. As her poems entered the public consciousness her reception
concentrated on her eccentric, reclusive nature, but since then she has
become acknowledged as an original and powerful poet. It is fortunate that
her sister gained access to the poems as without them American culture
would have been very much poorer.
Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and what the
work of a poet is. She experimented with language with the aim of freeing it
from conventional restraints. She created a new type of persona for the first
person narrator: the speakers in Dickinson’s poetry are observers who see
the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and
imaginable escape from that. To make the abstract concrete and to define
meaning without constraining it she created a distinctive language for
expressing what was not yet realized but possible. In her view while poetry
liberated the individual, it also left her ungrounded. When the first volume of
her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with
remarkable success. Going through eleven editions in less than two
years, the poems soon extended far beyond their first audiences to an
international one.
Photograph of Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson’s poems are taught in the United States in classes ranging
from middle school to post graduate courses in universities and colleges.
The poems appear widely in poetry anthologies and have been use as
texts and lyrics by several internationally renowned composers like John
Adams, Michael Tilson Thomas, Nick Peros and Aaron Copland. There are
several schools named after her. Some literary journals have been set up
exclusively to examine her poems, notably The Emily Dickinson Journal.
The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in her
honour in 1971.
Emily Dickinson’s most famous poem is Because I could not stop for
Death:
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898)
Lewis Carroll was an English academic, mathematician and Anglican

deacon. He is best known for two books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. He is noted for his brilliant word
play, nonsensical logic and fantasy. He invented the genre of literary
nonsense.
The books are children’s books and very Victorian in their nature. In
modern times there are record bestselling children’s authors like J.C.
Rowling but a hundred and fifty years after the publication of Alice no other
British children’s author has matched him for sales or fame. Indeed, the
name ‘Lewis Carroll’ is probably the most recognisable English literary
name after Shakespeare.
One of the things that has made Carroll rank among the world’s greatest
writers is his books’ ability, even after a century and a half, to baffle critics
and other experts in their quest to decode his various brainteasers,
mathematical problems and riddles. Alice originates as a simple story told
to the three daughters of one of Carroll’s friends but it is a sophisticated
puzzle devised by an exceptionally intelligent writer with an exceptional
degree of creativity and inventiveness.
Photograph of Lewis Carroll
For more than a century now, Alice in Wonderland’s ambiguity and

complexity have inspired film makers and theatre directors, fashion
designers, dancers, photographers and other artists to make their own
interpretations of the story. Walt Disney and Tim Burton have made film
adaptations of Alice and Through the Looking-Glass, and new cinematic
versions are being produced every couple of years. The Russian model
Natalia Vodianova has posed as Alice for Vogue, and sculptor José de
Creeft ‘s bronze statue of her stands in Central Park, New York. The other
characters, The Queen of Hearts, the Mad-Hatter the grinning Cheshire
cat, the neurotic White Rabbit, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and other
characters, are cult characters, among the most famous in all literature,
more famous, even, than those of Charles Dickens. Field Code Changed
Carroll’s poem, Jabberwocky, from Through the Looking-Glass, is the most

famous nonsense poem in literature. It conveys its emotions and its actions
effectively with none of the words having any meaning. Some of the words
he made up, like ‘chortle,’ and ‘galumphing,’ have entered the English
language.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
James Joyce was an Irish novelist, best known for his novel, Ulysses, and
his later novel, Finnegans Wake. He is regarded as one of the most
influential and important writers of the 20th century.
Ulysses is a seminal work in which Homer’s Odyssey is paralleled in a Field Code Changed
range of episodes and literary styles. Joyce’s collection of short stories,

Dubliners, is regarded as one of the best collection of stories of the century.
His first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) marks a new
era in British fiction, and Finnegans Wake is legendary for its complexity
and depth. Samuel Becket said about it: ‘His writing is not about something.
It is that something itself.’
Joyce’s influence on other writers, particularly Americans, is incalculable.

We see several examples of recent American novels that allude to Ulysses
while employing traditional narrative storytelling techniques and well-
defined characters. These novels are both popular and critically
substantive. A huge number of them invoke, the shape and central
characters of Joyce’s masterpiece.
It is more than just writers, it is culture generally that Joyce’s influence can
be felt. In Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion there is an episode
in its “Lives of the Cowboys” spoof where Martin Sheen plays James Joyce
in a gunfight with Clint Eastwood. One can hear the New Orleans-style jazz
band, Ulysses, on Saturday nights at the James Joyce pub in Santa
Barbara, California. There are tributes to James Joyce with references to
his works in music clubs across America.
Photograph of James Joyce
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake changed the literary landscape. The

nineteenth century novel was dominated by the English Romantics and the
French and Russian realists, but with the emergence of modernism in the
twentieth century writers began to pay more attention to language.
Modernism led to a change in emphasis from focus on character and plot to
the elements of the language itself. That is the particular thing that changed
the landscape of fiction and created some of the famous names of
twentieth century fiction: such writers as different as Samuel Becket, Jorge Field Code Changed
Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, Flann O’Brien, William

Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson.
In 1999 Time magazine named Joyce one of the hundred most important
people of the twentieth century. In 1998, the US publisher of Joyce’s works
ranked Ulysses number 1, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
number 3, and Finnegans Wake number 77, on its list of the 100 best
English-language novels of the twentieth century.
The work and life of Joyce is celebrated annually as Bloomsday on 16

June, in Dublin and in several other cities worldwide. In April 2013 the
Central Bank of Ireland issued a silver €10 commemorative coin in honour
of Joyce.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
Franz Kafka was a Czech novelist and short story writer who wrote in the
German language. He is universally regarded as one of the major figures of
20th century literature. His protagonists are isolated figures faced with
surrealistic or bizarre predicaments and incomprehensible bureaucracies.
The work explores themes of alienation, guilt and anxiety. The prose is full
of torture, description of wounds, disorientation, sadomasochism,
unexplained cruelty, appearance of rodents, beetles, vultures, and other
grotesque creatures—all set against a background of utter hopelessness
and despair.
The term, ‘Kafkaesque’ has become an English word referring to situations

like those in his novels and stories. He is best known for his novel The Trial
and a short fiction, The Metamorphosis. His unique body of writing — much
of which is incomplete and has been published posthumously — is among
the most influential in Western literature.
Kafkaesque situations occur when individuals are overwhelmed by

bureaucracies in an unreal, nightmarish environment in which s/he feels
disorientated and powerless. She has no resources to escape from the
nightmare. The term originally referred to situations in literature but has
come to apply to real life situations that are over-complex or bizarrely
illogical.
Photograph of Franz Kafka
In the arts, several Kafkaesque films have been made, notably, Polansky’s
The Tenant, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink and
science fiction series like The Twilight Zone. Scholars have identified Kafka
as having influenced several of the most well regarded 20th century writers,
like J.M. Coetzee, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Eugene Ionesco and Field Code Changed
J.D. Salinger.
Kafka created a sterile bureaucratic universe and his fiction is full of legal
and scientific terms. Yet that frightening vision also had insightful humour,
highlighting the ‘irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world.’
Much post-Kafka fiction, especially dystopian and science fiction, employ
the themes of Kafka’s universe. We see that in authors like George Orwell Field Code Changed
and Ray Bradbury.
In 1999 a committee of top German authors, scholars and literary critics

ranked The Trial the second most significant German-language novel of the
20th century. There is a museum in Prague dedicated to Kafka. The Franz
Kafka Museum’s aim is to surround the visitor with the world of Kafka’s
fiction. In 2001 the City of Prague and the Franz Kafka Society established
an annual literary award, the Franz Kafka Prize, with the following aim: to
recognise the merits of literature as ‘humanistic character and contribution
to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its existential,
timeless character, its generally human validity, and its ability to hand over
a testimony about our times.’
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American-born, British, poet, essayist,

playwright, critic, now regarded as one of the twentieth century’s major
poets. He received more rewards than almost any other writer of the past
two centuries, including the Nobel prize, the Dante Gold Medal, the Goethe
prize, the US Medal of Freedom and the British Order of Merit.
Eliot is best known for his great modern 20th century poem, The Waste
Land. Other poems that distinguish his work are Ash Wednesday, The
Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock, The Four Quartets, and the ever-popular
(particularly among children) Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. His
plays – verse dramas – Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party –
are amogn the landmarks of 20th century drama.
The Waste Land (1922) is widely regarded as a central text of modernism

and has frequently been described as the most important poem of the 20th
century. Although its experimentalism is demanding, making it difficult to
understand without hard work, it has fundamentally changed the ways in
which poetry is written and read. It is crucial to an understanding of modern
culture and a continual challenge to readers to re-evaluate how they think
about the world. The poem resonates on every continent. In South
America, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a significant essay on ‘The Eternal TS
Eliot’, while the Mexican poet and critic Pedro Serrano likes to align Eliot
with one of his most important Mexican readers, the great poet
Octavio Paz.
Photograph of T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land is famous for its obscure nature—its constant movement
between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and
time. This structural complexity is one of the reasons that the poem has
become the model for modern literature, together with a novel published in
the same year, James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Eliot was a spokesman for the 20th century. His poetry expresses the
fragile psychological state of human beings in the 20th century. It was a
time of traumatic transition: from the Victorian ideals to the modern era via
the First World War. Eliot strived to capture the transformed world –
fractured and alienated. The aftershocks of the war directly contributed to
the dissolution of the British Empire. Eliot saw society as paralysed and
wounded, and he believed that culture was crumbling and dissolving. The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) demonstrates this sense of
indecisive paralysis as the narrator wonders whether he dare eat a peach
or change something. Human beings’ damaged state prevented people
from communicating with each other, an idea that Eliot explored in many
works.
Eliot’s influence goes way beyond England and English poetry. His poems,
particularly The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, The Four Quartets and The
Hollow Men powerfully influenced the poetry of two of the most significant
post- war Irish poets, Martin O’Direain and Sean O’Riordain. Eliot
influenced, among many others, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf,
William Gaddis, Hart Crane, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce,
Geoffrey Hill.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist, widely regarded as one

of the greatest, if not the greatest, American writers of the 20th century. He
is best known for his novel, The Great Gatsby, which vies for the title ‘Great
American Novel’ with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Herman Field Code Changed
Melville’s Moby-Dick. Field Code Changed

Fitzgerald’s place on this list is justified by the fact that his great novel is
actually about America: it’s an exploration and criticism of the American
Dream, the ideal that any American can aspire to, and achieve, the highest
goals. Abraham Lincoln is usually quoted as having been the realization of
the Dream, advancing from birth in a log cabin to President of the United
States– a romantic, oversimplified version of the politician’s story.
Photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby is quite a short novel, ostensibly the story of doomed
love between a man and a woman. But that story is set against the
background of the American Dream crumbling at an historical time of
unprecedented prosperity and materialist excessiveness in the grip of
greed and the hollow pursuit of pleasure. The main idea is that the
unrestrained love of money and pleasure corroded the more noble ideals
epitomised by the Abraham Lincoln model.
When the First World War ended in 1918, the generation of young
Americans were disillusioned by the Victorian morality, which struck them
as hypocritical after the slaughter they had just witnessed. That, combined
with the rapid rise of the stock market which allowed a ‘new rich’ cohort to
enter the ranks of the wealthy, up until now the sole province of the old,
wealthy, pedigreed families – the American aristocracy. The changes were
compounded by the banning of the sale of alcohol, which created a
lucrative criminal underworld in which enterprising operators could also join
the ranks of the aristocracy. American society was traumatised as the
currents among these interests stirred things up. The Great Gatsby
explores this post war ‘Jazz age’ in a compelling story of love and loss.
Fitgerald is one of the most-read American writers. Millions of copies of The

Great Gatsby and his other works have been sold, and The Great Gatsby,
a constant best-seller, is requiredreading in many high school and college
classes. Wherever there is an American Studies department in a university
anywhere in the world Gatsby is near the top of the reading list.
Fitzgerald’s legacy is incalculable. In his New York Times obituary it was

written, he ‘was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he
invented a generation… He might have interpreted them and even guided
them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom
threatened with destruction.’
Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986)
Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer of poems, translations, essays,

literary criticism and, what he is best known for, short fiction.
It would be impossible even for the greatest fans of this Argentine writer to
describe or explain his writing. The most one can say is that his work has
inspired countless writers, none of whom have come close to capturing the
magic of his work. He wrote poems but is famous for, and remembered for,
his prose – short pieces, what one may call short stories but which he
called ‘fictions.’
His fictions have been labelled ‘postmodern,’ because they depart from the
conventions of modern short fiction forms. For example, Borges almost
completely eliminates narrative. He generally dispenses with plot unless he
wants to exploit the actual concept of plot for the purpose of doing
something unconventional with it. He omits such features of fiction as
sequence, causation and character relationships, thereby challenging our
expectations of a story as we read his stories, and our expectations of
fiction generally. At the same time the fictions are fascinating, interesting to
read and attention grabbing. The uniqueness of his fictions and the
influence they had on the work of subsequent writers places him squarely
in this category of the world’s greatest all time writers. The philosophical
term ‘Borgesian conundrum’ is named after him. The term refers to whether
the writer writes the story, or the story writes him.
Borges published his masterpiece, Ficciones, in 1944: it comprises
seventeen short stories that explore the labyrinthine nature of reality.
Labyrinths are a major theme in his work, the idea that life is made up of
recurring, inexplicable, repetitive versions of our perception of reality. There
are many stories about the way in which the imaginary world impacts on
what we think of as the real world – such as reviews of imaginary books
written by imaginary authors, which is a recurrent device in Borges. Fiction
and reality are seamlessly intertwined in Borges’s writing.
Borges is considered to be one of the most influential writers of all times.

He penned essays, newspaper articles, poetry and the short stories that he
mastered to the highest degree, making himself one of the most famous
writers of short fiction in literary history. His work has influenced countless
other writers from around the world, such as Colombian author Gabriel Field Code Changed
García Márquez and Umberto Eco. The Italian writer paid tribute to Borges
in his acclaimed novel The Name of the Rose with the character Jorge de
Burgos – a blind monk. In addition, the devices he used in his fictions have
been something of a textbook for a generation of writers of postmodern
fiction.
George Orwell 1903-1950
George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, a twentieth century writer,
equally at home with journalism, essays, novels, literary criticism and social
commentary. He was famous in all those areas, but will be particularly
remembered for two of his novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four,
both among the most significant works of literature of the twentieth century
and two of the most influential.
Three of his non-fiction collections are classics of journalism. Down and

Out in Paris and London (1933) tells the story of living as a tramp in those
two rich cities; The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a close observation of the
working class in the north of England and Homage to Catalonia (1938) is
an account of his activities in the Spanish Civil War.
A keen observer of the trends of his time Orwell forged his two great novels
from those observations and, particularly in the case of Nineteen Eighty
Four he emerged as a kind of prophet, warning society about where it
seemed to be heading. In the novel people have become dehumanised,
governed by an unseen administration that controls them with a fast-
growing technology. The novel makes the future look bleak. Governments
since the book came out have often been warned by their critics of bringing
the country closer to nineteen eighty four, with the increase of such things
as censorship and camera surveillance. The language Orwell used in
writing this novel contains many words and phrases which he employed to
create the dystopian world of the novel.
George Orwell photo
Some of the words and phrases he invented have entered into the English
language and are used routinely, eg. Big Brother, thought police, Room
101, thoughtcrime, doublethink.
Some other newspeak words are: joycamp (forced labour camp); goodthink
(correct thinking); oldthink (thought that disregards the revolution);
prolefeed (the endless stream of television propaganda).
Animal Farm is a short novel that depicts the Russian Revolution of 1917
and the beginning of the Stalin era. The story is told using the techniques of
allegorical fiction. The characters are animals and different groups of Soviet
society are represented by the classes of animals, eg. The proletarians are
sheep, the members of the Communist party are pigs, the security police
are dogs etc. The novel is written in such a way as to be accessible to
everyone, and can be read on one level by a child. It is a remarkable book
that explores the Revolution in great depth in a short text.
Apart from his linguistic inventiveness in his novels Orwell’s style when
writing essays and journalism is very plain and simple, clear and lucid. He
set out rules for that kind of writing that included using short words, fresh
metaphors if metaphors are needed, cut out any words that it is possible to
cut out, don’t use scientific language or jargon or foreign phrases and don’t
use the passive case. Employing those rules in his own writing Orwell
produced a very high level of communication. One of his essays, How to kill
an Elephant, written in stripped down prose, for example, conveys
immense feeling by the mere shock of the elephant’s death. While working
as a policeman in Burma in 1930 Orwell witnessed a hanging and wrote
about it in a piece, A Hanging. The reader feels the full horror of it \s Orwell
describes it in unemotional, factual, unadorned language.
Some writers’style or ideas are so distinct that their names become

adjectives to describe those styles or ideas, as in Shakespearean and
Miltonian. Orwellian has been added to that list. To describe something as
Orwellian is to refer, not just to a kind of writing but a kind of situation in
which a population is controlled by misinformation, surveillance, the
rewriting of history and the policing of peoples’thoughts.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927 – 2014)
Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, screenwriter and

journalist, affectionately referred to by the nickname Gabo or Gabito by the
writers and readers of South America, the continent to which he gave a
distinctive voice. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982,
and it is generally considered that the novel that clinched it was One
Hundred Years of Solitude, the work for which he is best known.
With the exception of Jorge Luis Borges, Marquez is the best known Latin Field Code Changed
American writer of all time. One of his great virtues as a novelist and short
story writer is that his works are highly accessible to ordinary readers as
well as meeting the demands of the world’s most sophisticated critics and
scholars. He had the ability to create vast, intricate plots with stories about
local and family life full of humour, irony, and even comedy. The novels are
mainly set in provincial Colombia where traditional and modern practices
and beliefs meet and clash in both tragic and comic scenarios.
Photohtsph of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The one thing that places Marquez among the great writers, more than
anything else, is that he’s the virtual inventor of the literary technique
known as ‘magical realism,’ in which perspectives are distorted. He is able
in his writing and storytelling to make the fantastical and fanciful normal. In
one scene he has ice miraculously created by the hot hands of children
who have lived their whole lives in the topics. It appears completely normal
and natural in the context of the story. In another a young woman’s sudden
ascension into heaven is seen as normal in her community. Perhaps
Colombia was the perfect place for such literature to emerge. As Marquez
himself said, ‘Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.’ Magical
realism reflected the Colombian world that he knew, a world in which
volatility, insurrection and revolution were always just beneath the surface.
Subsequent writers, in other countries as well, have been heavily
influenced by Marquez. The idea of setting a parochial story with local
characters against a giant political canvas has travelled well. Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, draws upon magical realism in its story of
the birth of a new nation. Midnight’s Children, tells the story of a boy
growing up in rural India, and was an international success, like Marquez’s
novels. Rushdie said: “the thing about Garcia Marquez that I admire, that I
think is extraordinary, is that his writing is based on a village view of the
world.”

Best Writer of The World

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Best Writer of The World

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Who are the best writers the world has ever known?

We don’t necessarily have to talk about their writing style or how

And then, particularly if we are including Shakespeare as one of

Fiction writers do not write to transmit an idea or report on

profound effect on the English language: the way we use it today

Homer (About 850 BCE)

Sophocles (496-406 BCE)

Sophocles, an ancient Greek dramatist, wrote plays that have stood as a

He dramatically changed the tragic form by adding a third actor, thereby

 Shakespeare Field Code Changed

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70 BCE – 19 BCE)

Evangelist, Mark (1st Century CE)

Before the introduction of Jesus of Nazareth into written literature as a

Dante (Durante degli Alighieri) (1265-1321)

Like Shakespeare’s, too, Dante’s influence has spread to global

many others, as well as painters and composers. Field Code Changed

Geoffrey Chaucer 1343-1400

Geoffrey Chaucer led an eventful, exciting life, by any standards. He is

Chaucer was deeply immersed in public life and he established a family

Chaucer’s influence on English literature is one thing; he also had an

Francois Rabelais (1494 – 1553)

Francois Rabelais portrait

In the four books of The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais’

Rabelais’ lasting influence has nothing to do with his view of himself as an

Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Cortinas) (1547-1616)

The Spaniard, Miguel Cervantes, a contemporary of Shakespeare,

Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes

The story is about the adventures of a Spanish nobleman, Alonso Quixano,

The novel’s incalculable influence on subsequent writers lies in the literary

John Donne 1572-1631

In 1591 he began studying law and qualified as a lawyer. By this time he

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears;

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

But we by a love so far 4 refined,

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

If they be two, they are two so

And though it in the centre sit,

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

‘Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

English is often referred to as ‘the language of Shakespeare and Milton.’

John Milton portrait

The Angel ended, and in Adams Eare

John Bunyan (1628 – 1688)

The Pilgrim’s Progress is the most famous allegory ever written. In

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet ) (1694-1778)

François-Marie Arouet (nicknamed ‘Voltaire,’) was a French philosopher,

Voltaire was a versatile writer, writing in almost every literary form –

The influence of Voltaire’s writings, particular Candide, on subsequent

Some of the modern genres in literature have been influenced by Candide,

Voltaire was enormously influential in the development of a modern

Voltaire’s influence as a philosopher is incalculable. Western thinking has

 ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him’

 ‘God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh’

One wonders at the restraint in that, considering that Jane Austen is

Jane Austen – a portrait by her sister Cassandra

As with Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens, the other main English

On the surface the novels resemble modern romantic boy-meets-girl fiction

Hans Christian Andersen (1806-1875)

Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish playwright, travel writer, poet,

It would not be possible to overestimate Andersen’s impact on children’s

Many children’s writers have acknowledged their debt to Andersen. His

Charles Dickens was an extraordinary man. He is best known as a novelist