A Heian courtier, a Greek poet in fragments, Nobel laureates and the best-selling novelist alive or dead. Every era gets a candidate.
1Agatha ChristieThe best-selling novelist in any language, and the writer who set the rules of the whodunit.
2Jane AustenThe Regency novelist whose six books remain the most adapted in English literature.
3Toni MorrisonThe Nobel and Pulitzer winner behind Beloved and Song of Solomon.
4Virginia WoolfThe modernist who reshaped the English sentence and argued for a room of one's own.
5Emily DickinsonThe Amherst poet who published almost nothing in her lifetime and changed American poetry after it.
6Mary ShelleyThe author of Frankenstein, which effectively invented science fiction.
7Charlotte BrontëThe author of Jane Eyre, a first-person heroine unlike anything before her.
8Simone de BeauvoirThe French philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex founded modern feminist theory.
9Maya AngelouThe memoirist and poet of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
10Ursula K. Le GuinThe author of The Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea, who made genre fiction literary.
11Margaret AtwoodThe Canadian novelist of The Handmaid's Tale and twice a Booker winner.
12Harper LeeThe author of To Kill a Mockingbird, a Pulitzer winner who published almost nothing else.
13George EliotMary Ann Evans, whose Middlemarch is regularly called the best English novel.
14Murasaki ShikibuThe Heian court writer whose Tale of Genji, around 1010, is often called the first novel.
15Sylvia PlathThe poet of Ariel and novelist of The Bell Jar, awarded a posthumous Pulitzer.
16Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieThe Nigerian novelist of Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah.
17Doris LessingThe Nobel laureate behind The Golden Notebook.
18SapphoThe archaic Greek poet of Lesbos, read in fragments for 2,600 years.
Comments 1
Sappho survives in fragments and Murasaki Shikibu wrote around 1010, and the best-seller beside them held a career for fifty-five years: https://youpick.best/articles/agatha-christie-ranked-many-ways
YP
ypb-teamAug 21
