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First Edition

Britannica Educational PublishingMichael I. Levy: Executive EditorMarilyn L. Barton: Senior Coordinator, Production ControlSteven Bosco: Director, Editorial TechnologiesLisa S. Braucher: Senior Producer and Data EditorYvette Charboneau: Senior Copy EditorKathy Nakamura: Manager, Media AcquisitionJ. E. Luebering: Manager and Senior Editor, Literature

Rosen Educational ServicesJeanne Nagle: Senior EditorNelson S: Art DirectorMatthew Cauli: DesignerIntroduction by Chris Hayhurst

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The 100 most influential writers of all time / edited by J. E. Luebering.1st ed. p. cm.(The Britannica guide to the worlds most influential people)ISBN 978-1-61530-096-9 (eBook)1. AuthorsBiography. 2. LiteratureBio-bibliography. I. Luebering, J. E. II. Title: One hundred most influential writers of all time.PN451.A15 2010809dc22[B]

2009029207

On the cover: The influence of William Shakespeare, considered the greatest dramatist of all time, has spread far and wide and transcends the ages. Getty Images

Photo credits: p. 8 www.istockphoto.com/Nick Schlax; p. 16 www.istockphoto.com/Vetta Collection.

Introduction 8Homer 17Aeschylus 22Sophocles 26Aristophanes 29Gaius Valerius Catullus 31Virgil 33Imru al-Qays 38Du Fu 39al-Mutanabb 41Ferdows 42Murasaki Shikibu 45Rm 46Dante 51Petrarch 55Geoffrey Chaucer 58Lus de Cames 62Michel de Montaigne 64Miguel de Cervantes 67Edmund Spenser 73Lope de Vega 76Christopher Marlowe 78William Shakespeare 80John Donne 89John Milton 93Jean Racine 96Aphra Behn 99Bash 100Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz 103Daniel Defoe 105Jonathan Swift 108Voltaire 111Henry Fielding 114Samuel Johnson 116

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CONTENTS

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 119

Robert Burns 125William Wordsworth 129Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet 132Samuel Taylor Coleridge 135Jane Austen 138George Gordon Byron,

6th Baron Byron 142Percy Bysshe Shelley 145John Keats 148Aleksandr Pushkin 151Victor Hugo 154Nathaniel Hawthorne 158Edgar Allan Poe 160Charles Dickens 164Robert Browning 168Charlotte Bront 171Henry David Thoreau 175Emily Bront 177Walt Whitman 179Herman Melville 183George Eliot 188Charles Baudelaire 192Fyodor Dostoyevsky 196Gustave Flaubert 199Henrik Ibsen 200Leo Tolstoy 203Emily Dickinson 206Lewis Carroll 212Mark Twain 215mile Zola 222Henry James 224August Strindberg 226Oscar Wilde 229Arthur Rimbaud 233

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George Bernard Shaw 235Anton Chekhov 238Rabindranath Tagore 240William Butler Yeats 243Luigi Pirandello 246Marcel Proust 249Robert Frost 251Thomas Mann 253Lu Xun 256Virginia Woolf 260James Joyce 267Franz Kafka 271T. S. Eliot 275Eugene ONeill 278Anna Akhmatova 280William Faulkner 283Vladimir Nabokov 286Ernest Hemingway 289John Steinbeck 293George Orwell 295Pablo Neruda 297Samuel Beckett 300Richard Wright 303Eudora Welty 306Naguib Mahfouz 308Albert Camus 310Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 312Jack Kerouac 316Flannery OConnor 319Toni Morrison 321Wole Soyinka 323Sir Salman Rushdie 325J. K. Rowling 327Glossary 330For Further Reading 332Index 334

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7 Homer 7

HOMER (fl ourished 9th or 8th century BCE ?, Ionia? [now in Turkey])

Homer is the presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey . Although these two great epic poems of ancient Greece have always been attributed to the shad-owy fi gure of Homer, little is known of him beyond the fact that his was the name attached in antiquity by the Greeks themselves to the poems. That there was an epic poet called Homer and that he played the primary part in shaping the Iliad and the Odyssey so much may be said to be probable. If this assumption is accepted, then Homer must assuredly be one of the greatest of the worlds literary artists.

He is also one of the most infl uential authors in the widest sense, for the two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the Classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. Indirectly through the medium of Virgils Aeneid (loosely molded after the patterns of the Iliad and the Odyssey ), directly through their revival under Byzantine culture from the late 8th century CE onward, and subsequently through their passage into Italy with the Greek scholars who fl ed westward from the Ottomans, the Homeric epics had a profound impact on the Renaissance culture of Italy. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the classical European tradition.

Early References

Implicit references to Homer and quotations from the poems date to the middle of the 7th century BCE . Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus, and Callinus in the 7th century and Sappho and others in the early 6th adapted

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Homeric phraseology and metre to their own purposes and rhythms. At the same time scenes from the epics became popular in works of art. The pseudo-Homeric Hymn to Apollo of Delos, probably of late 7th-century composition, claimed to be the work of a blind man who dwells in rugged Chios, a reference to a tradition about Homer himself. The idea that Homer had descendants known as Homeridae, and that they had taken over the preservation and propagation of his poetry, goes back at least to the early 6th century BCE.

It was not long before a kind of Homeric scholarship began: Theagenes of Rhegium in southern Italy toward the end of the same century wrote the first of many allego-rizing interpretations. By the 5th century biographical fictions were well under way. The Pre-Socratic philoso-pher Heracleitus of Ephesus made use of a trivial legend of Homers deaththat it was caused by chagrin at not being able to solve some boys riddle about catching liceand the concept of a contest of quotations between Homer and Hesiod (after Homer, the most ancient of Greek poets) may have been initiated in the Sophistic tradition. The historian Herodotus assigned the formulation of Greek theology to Homer and Hesiod, and claimed that they could have lived no more than 400 years before his own time, the 5th century BCE. This should be contrasted with the superficial assumption, popular in many circles throughout antiquity, that Homer must have lived not much later than the Trojan War about which he sang.

The general belief that Homer was a native of Ionia (the central part of the western seaboard of Asia Minor) seems a reasonable conjecture for the poems themselves are in predominantly Ionic dialect. Although Smyrna and Chios early began competing for the honour (the poet Pindar, early in the 5th century BCE, associated Homer with both), and others joined in, no authenticated local

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7 Homer 7

memory survived anywhere of someone who, oral poet or not, must have been remarkable in his time.

Modern Inferences

Modern scholars agree with the ancient sources only about Homers general place of activity. The most concrete piece of ancient evidence is that his descendants, the Homeridae, lived on the Ionic island of Chios.

Admittedly, there is some doubt over whether the Iliadand the Odyssey were even composed by the same main author. Such doubts began in antiquity itself and depended mainly on the difference of genre (the Iliad being martial and heroic, the Odyssey picaresque and often fantastic), but they may be reinforced by subtle differences of vocabulary even apart from those imposed by different subjects. The similarities of the two poems are partly due to the coher-ence of the heroic poetical tradition that lay behind both.

Partly on the basis of the internal evidence of the poems, which is of some use in determining when Homer lived, it seems plausible to conclude that the period of composition of the large-scale epics (as distinct from their much shorter predecessors) was the 9th or 8th century, with several features pointing more clearly to the 8th. The Odyssey may belong near the end of this century, the Iliadcloser to its middle. It may be no coincidence that cults of Homeric heroes tended to spring up toward the end of the 8th century, and that scenes from the epic begin to appear on pots at just about the same time.

Homer as an Oral Poet

But even if his name is known and his date and region can be inferred, Homer remains primarily a projection of the great poems themselves. Their qualities are significant of

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his taste and his view of the world, but they also reveal something more specific about his technique and the kind of poet he was. Homeric tradition was an oral one: this was a kind of poetry made and passed down by word of mouth and without the intervention of writing. Indeed Homers own term for a poet is aoidos, singer. Ordinary aoidoi,whether resident at a royal court or performing at the invi-tation of a towns aristocracy, worked with relatively short poems that could be given completely on a single occasion. These poems must have provided the backbone of the tra-dition inherited by Hom