100 Authors Every Educated Adult Should Know

No.	Item	Definition
1.	Agatha Christie	English mystery novelist who created Hercule Poirot.
2.	Albert Camus	French Algerian novelist and essayist exploring the absurd.
3.	Alexander Pushkin	Russian poet and novelist who wrote Eugene Onegin.
4.	Alexandre Dumas	French adventure novelist of The Three Musketeers.
5.	Anton Chekhov	Russian master of short stories and modern drama.
6.	Aristotle	Greek philosopher writing on ethics, politics, and poetics.
7.	Arthur Conan Doyle	Scottish author who created Sherlock Holmes.
8.	Cao Xueqin	Chinese novelist behind Dream of the Red Chamber.
9.	Charles Baudelaire	French poet who wrote The Flowers of Evil.
10.	Charles Dickens	English novelist portraying Victorian society and injustice.
11.	Charlotte Brontë	English novelist who wrote Jane Eyre.
12.	Chinua Achebe	Nigerian novelist who wrote Things Fall Apart.
13.	Clarice Lispector	Brazilian novelist exploring consciousness through experimental prose.
14.	Daniel Defoe	English novelist who wrote Robinson Crusoe.
15.	Dante Alighieri	Italian poet who wrote The Divine Comedy.
16.	Doris Lessing	British novelist who wrote The Golden Notebook.
17.	Edgar Allan Poe	American poet and pioneer of detective fiction.
18.	Émile Zola	French naturalist novelist and defender of Alfred Dreyfus.
19.	Emily Brontë	English novelist and poet who wrote Wuthering Heights.
20.	Emily Dickinson	American poet of compressed, unconventional lyric verse.
21.	Ernest Hemingway	American novelist known for spare, understated prose.
22.	F. Scott Fitzgerald	American novelist who wrote The Great Gatsby.
23.	Ferdowsi	Persian poet who composed the Shahnameh.
24.	Franz Kafka	Prague writer depicting alienation and bewildering authority.
25.	Friedrich Nietzsche	German philosopher known for radical critiques of morality.
26.	Fyodor Dostoevsky	Russian novelist exploring morality, faith, and psychological conflict.
27.	Gabriel García Márquez	Colombian novelist celebrated for magical realism.
28.	Geoffrey Chaucer	English poet who wrote The Canterbury Tales.
29.	George Eliot	English novelist known for Middlemarch and moral complexity.
30.	George Orwell	English author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
31.	Gustave Flaubert	French novelist who wrote Madame Bovary.
32.	Harper Lee	American novelist who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.
33.	Henry David Thoreau	American author of Walden and Civil Disobedience.
34.	Henry James	American-born novelist exploring consciousness and transatlantic society.
35.	Herman Melville	American novelist who wrote Moby-Dick.
36.	Homer	Ancient Greek poet credited with Iliad and Odyssey.
37.	Honoré de Balzac	French novelist behind the expansive Human Comedy.
38.	Isabel Allende	Chilean novelist of The House of the Spirits.
39.	Italo Calvino	Italian novelist known for imaginative, experimental storytelling.
40.	J. R. R. Tolkien	English fantasy author of The Lord of Rings.
41.	James Baldwin	American novelist and essayist on race and sexuality.
42.	James Joyce	Irish modernist author of Ulysses and Dubliners.
43.	Jane Austen	English novelist of manners, marriage, and social class.
44.	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	German poet, novelist, and author of Faust.
45.	John Milton	English poet who wrote Paradise Lost.
46.	John Steinbeck	American novelist who wrote The Grapes of Wrath.
47.	Kalidasa	Classical Sanskrit poet and playwright of Shakuntala.
48.	Karl Marx	German political thinker and author of Capital.
49.	Kurt Vonnegut	American satirical novelist who wrote Slaughterhouse-Five.
50.	Langston Hughes	American poet central to the Harlem Renaissance.
51.	Leo Tolstoy	Russian novelist of War and Peace.
52.	Lewis Carroll	English author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
53.	Lord Byron	English Romantic poet known for Don Juan.
54.	Lu Xun	Chinese writer central to modern vernacular literature.
55.	Marcel Proust	French novelist of In Search of Lost Time.
56.	Mark Twain	American humorist and novelist of Huckleberry Finn.
57.	Mary Shelley	English novelist who wrote Frankenstein.
58.	Miguel de Cervantes	Spanish novelist who wrote Don Quixote.
59.	Murasaki Shikibu	Japanese author of The Tale of Genji.
60.	Naguib Mahfouz	Egyptian novelist who wrote The Cairo Trilogy.
61.	Nathaniel Hawthorne	American novelist exploring guilt in The Scarlet Letter.
62.	Natsume Sōseki	Japanese novelist known for Kokoro and social observation.
63.	Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o	Kenyan novelist and advocate for African-language literature.
64.	Niccolò Machiavelli	Italian political writer who wrote The Prince.
65.	Nikolai Gogol	Russian-language satirist known for Dead Souls.
66.	Octavia E. Butler	American science fiction novelist exploring power and difference.
67.	Orhan Pamuk	Turkish novelist exploring memory, identity, and cultural conflict.
68.	Oscar Wilde	Irish playwright and novelist famed for wit.
69.	Ovid	Roman poet known for Metamorphoses.
70.	Pablo Neruda	Chilean poet of love, politics, and everyday things.
71.	Plato	Greek philosopher whose dialogues include The Republic.
72.	Primo Levi	Italian Holocaust survivor, memoirist, novelist, and chemist.
73.	Rabindranath Tagore	Bengali poet, novelist, and playwright who wrote Gitanjali.
74.	Rainer Maria Rilke	German-language poet who wrote the Duino Elegies.
75.	Robert Frost	American poet known for rural New England settings.
76.	Rumi	Persian poet known for mystical and spiritual verse.
77.	Samuel Beckett	Irish playwright and novelist of Waiting for Godot.
78.	Sappho	Ancient Greek lyric poet of love and longing.
79.	Seamus Heaney	Irish poet exploring memory, landscape, and political conflict.
80.	Simone de Beauvoir	French feminist philosopher who wrote The Second Sex.
81.	Sophocles	Greek tragedian who wrote Oedipus Rex and Antigone.
82.	Sylvia Plath	American poet and novelist who wrote Ariel.
83.	T. S. Eliot	Modernist poet who wrote The Waste Land.
84.	Thomas Hardy	English novelist and poet depicting rural tragedy.
85.	Toni Morrison	American novelist exploring Black history and identity.
86.	Umberto Eco	Italian novelist, semiotician, and scholar of medieval culture.
87.	Ursula K. Le Guin	American author of speculative fiction and Earthsea.
88.	Victor Hugo	French novelist and poet who wrote Les Misérables.
89.	Virgil	Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid.
90.	Virginia Woolf	English modernist novelist and influential feminist essayist.
91.	Voltaire	French Enlightenment satirist who wrote Candide.
92.	W. B. Yeats	Irish poet and dramatist of myth and history.
93.	Walt Whitman	American poet who wrote Leaves of Grass.
94.	William Blake	English visionary poet and artist of prophetic works.
95.	William Faulkner	American modernist novelist of the Southern United States.
96.	William Shakespeare	English playwright of Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear.
97.	William Wordsworth	English Romantic poet celebrating nature and ordinary experience.
98.	Yasunari Kawabata	Japanese novelist known for Snow Country.
99.	Yukio Mishima	Japanese novelist and playwright exploring beauty and death.
100.	Zora Neale Hurston	American novelist and folklorist documenting Black Southern life.