Who is the most overrated classic author?

Reading-list giants, Nobel winners and a couple of names English teachers swear by. Somebody on this list is coasting on reputation.

1. 1
   Edgar Allan Poe

   Master of the macabre whom Emerson reportedly dismissed as "the jingle man."
2. 2
   Ernest Hemingway

   Nobel laureate of The Old Man and the Sea and the short, hard sentence.
3. 3
   F. Scott Fitzgerald

   Jazz Age novelist of The Great Gatsby.
4. 4
   Charles Dickens

   Victorian serial novelist of Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol.
5. 5
   James Joyce

   Irish modernist of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
6. 6
   J. D. Salinger

   Author of The Catcher in the Rye and a famous recluse.
7. 7
   Herman Melville

   Author of Moby-Dick, a flop in his lifetime and a classic after it.
8. 8
   Henry James

   Novelist of The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw.
9. 9
   Jane Austen

   Regency novelist of Pride and Prejudice and Emma.
10. 10
    Virginia Woolf

    Modernist of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
11. 11
    D. H. Lawrence

    Author of Sons and Lovers and the once-banned Lady Chatterley's Lover.
12. 12
    Thomas Hardy

    Novelist of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Wessex gloom.
13. 13
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Author of The Scarlet Letter, a high-school reading-list fixture.
14. 14
    William Faulkner

    Mississippi Nobel laureate of The Sound and the Fury.
15. 15
    Ayn Rand

    Novelist of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

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