# Who is the greatest American writer of all time?

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

*By YPB Team · Published August 11, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-greatest-american-writer-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

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.

Tags: usa, books, classics, writers