The 43 Best American Writers of All Time

Nobel laureates, one-book wonders, and the man who wrote the first American bestseller.

1. 1
   Mark Twain

   Wrote Huckleberry Finn and gave American prose its own voice.
   1000pts
2. 2
   William Faulkner

   Built Yoknapatawpha County across a dozen novels and won the Nobel.
   826pts
3. 3
   John Steinbeck

   The Grapes of Wrath put the Depression on the page and won the Nobel.
   744pts
4. 4
   Ernest Hemingway

   Stripped American sentences to the bone and won the Nobel for it.
   639pts
5. 5
   Walt Whitman

   Leaves of Grass invented American free verse.
   569pts
6. 6
   Jack Kerouac

   Typed On the Road on a single scroll of paper and became the voice of the Beat Generation.
   569pts
7. 7
   Henry David Thoreau

   Spent two years in a cabin at Walden Pond and wrote Walden and Civil Disobedience, two books that still shape American thinking.
   569pts
8. 8
   Toni Morrison

   Nobel laureate whose Beloved reshaped the American novel.
   529pts
9. 9
   Thomas Pynchon

   Reclusive author of Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, the most celebrated postmodern novelist America has produced.
   529pts
10. 10
    Philip Roth

    From Portnoy's Complaint to the Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral, he chronicled postwar American life across more than thirty books.
    483pts
11. 11
    Willa Cather

    Wrote the Great Plains into literature with O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.
    483pts
12. 12
    Henry James

    Master of the psychological novel whose The Portrait of a Lady set Americans loose among the manners of old Europe.
    433pts
13. 13
    Edgar Allan Poe

    Invented the detective story and perfected the American gothic.
    433pts
14. 14
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    The Scarlet Letter turned the Puritan past into the first great American novel of guilt and conscience.
    433pts
15. 15
    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    The Great Gatsby is still the novel people mean by the American Dream.
    433pts
16. 16
    Saul Bellow

    Won the Nobel Prize and three National Book Awards for novels such as The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog.
    433pts
17. 17
    Eugene O'Neill

    The only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize, and the author of Long Day's Journey into Night.
    433pts
18. 18
    Edith Wharton

    Dissected old New York society in The House of Mirth and became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
    432pts
19. 19
    John Updike

    Followed Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom through four decades of American life and won two Pulitzer Prizes for the series.
    432pts
20. 20
    Ray Bradbury

    Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles carried science fiction out of the pulps and into American classrooms.
    432pts
21. 21
    Jack London

    Former oyster pirate and Klondike prospector whose The Call of the Wild made him one of the best-paid writers in America.
    375pts
22. 22
    J. D. Salinger

    The Catcher in the Rye gave American teenagers Holden Caulfield, then its author withdrew from public life for the rest of his long life.
    375pts
23. 23
    Maya Angelou

    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings turned memoir into American literature.
    375pts
24. 24
    Joan Didion

    Defined the New Journalism with Slouching Towards Bethlehem and later wrote The Year of Magical Thinking about grief.
    375pts
25. 25
    James Baldwin

    Essayist and novelist who wrote the sharpest prose on American race.
    375pts
26. 26
    Ralph Ellison

    Invisible Man, his only novel published in his lifetime, won the 1953 National Book Award and remains a landmark on race and identity.
    375pts
27. 27
    Langston Hughes

    The leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, who brought jazz and blues rhythms into American verse.
    309pts
28. 28
    Emily Dickinson

    Published barely ten poems in her lifetime and left nearly 1,800 behind, the most original body of verse in American literature.
    309pts
29. 29
    Arthur Miller

    Death of a Salesman and The Crucible made him the conscience of American theatre in the twentieth century.
    309pts
30. 30
    Sinclair Lewis

    Satirised small-town America in Main Street and Babbitt and became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
    309pts
31. 31
    Richard Wright

    Native Son and the memoir Black Boy confronted white America with the reality of racism in the 1940s.
    309pts
32. 32
    Kurt Vonnegut

    Survived the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war and turned it into Slaughterhouse-Five, the great darkly comic anti-war novel.
    309pts
33. 33
    Benjamin Franklin

    His Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack are the first American bestsellers.
    309pts
34. 34
    Harriet Beecher Stowe

    Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century and turned millions of readers against slavery.
    309pts
35. 35
    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    The essays that taught American writers to stop imitating Europe.
    309pts
36. 36
    Stephen King

    Has sold more than 350 million books, from Carrie and The Shining to It, and made horror mainstream American fiction.
    233pts
37. 37
    Cormac McCarthy

    Wrote Blood Meridian and the Pulitzer-winning The Road in a biblical, punctuation-free prose that no one has managed to imitate.
    144pts
38. 38
    Zora Neale Hurston

    Novelist and folklorist whose Their Eyes Were Watching God was rediscovered decades after her death and is now an American classic.
    144pts
39. 39
    Tennessee Williams

    Playwright of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, both of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
    144pts
40. 40
    Robert Frost

    Won four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry and wrote The Road Not Taken, probably the most quoted American poem.
    144pts
41. 41
    Sylvia Plath

    Poet of Ariel and author of The Bell Jar, the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously.
    0pts
42. 42
    Herman Melville

    Moby-Dick was a commercial failure and is now the great American novel.
    0pts
43. 43
    Harper Lee

    One novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and a permanent place on every syllabus.
    0pts

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