# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published October 13, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-most-overrated-classic-author*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Edgar Allan Poe**
   Master of the macabre whom Emerson reportedly dismissed as "the jingle man."
2. **Ernest Hemingway**
   Nobel laureate of The Old Man and the Sea and the short, hard sentence.
3. **F. Scott Fitzgerald**
   Jazz Age novelist of The Great Gatsby.
4. **Charles Dickens**
   Victorian serial novelist of Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol.
5. **James Joyce**
   Irish modernist of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
6. **J. D. Salinger**
   Author of The Catcher in the Rye and a famous recluse.
7. **Herman Melville**
   Author of Moby-Dick, a flop in his lifetime and a classic after it.
8. **Henry James**
   Novelist of The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw.
9. **Jane Austen**
   Regency novelist of Pride and Prejudice and Emma.
10. **Virginia Woolf**
   Modernist of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
11. **D. H. Lawrence**
   Author of Sons and Lovers and the once-banned Lady Chatterley's Lover.
12. **Thomas Hardy**
   Novelist of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Wessex gloom.
13. **Nathaniel Hawthorne**
   Author of The Scarlet Letter, a high-school reading-list fixture.
14. **William Faulkner**
   Mississippi Nobel laureate of The Sound and the Fury.
15. **Ayn Rand**
   Novelist of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

Tags: books, classics, authors, overrated