Who is the greatest American writer of all time?

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

1

Mark Twain

Wrote Huckleberry Finn and gave American prose its own voice.

2

Benjamin Franklin

His Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack are the first American bestsellers.

3

Toni Morrison

Nobel laureate whose Beloved reshaped the American novel.

4

William Faulkner

Built Yoknapatawpha County across a dozen novels and won the Nobel.

5

Ernest Hemingway

Stripped American sentences to the bone and won the Nobel for it.

6

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby is still the novel people mean by the American Dream.

7

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass invented American free verse.

8

Edgar Allan Poe

Invented the detective story and perfected the American gothic.

9

John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath put the Depression on the page and won the Nobel.

10

James Baldwin

Essayist and novelist who wrote the sharpest prose on American race.

11

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick was a commercial failure and is now the great American novel.

12

Harper Lee

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

13

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essays that taught American writers to stop imitating Europe.

14

Maya Angelou

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings turned memoir into American literature.