Author Daniel S. Burt has compiled a compelling assessment of the 100 most influential novelists, playwrights, and poets from all times and cultures. From Shakespeare and Dante to Zeami Motokiyo and Oscar Wilde, the entries provide a fascinating, accessible introduction to major writers of world literature. All of the writers chosen have helped to redefine literature, establishing a standard with which succeeding generations of writers and readers have had to contend. The ranking attempts to discern, from the broadest possible perspective, what makes a literary artist great and how that greatness can be measured and compared. Each profile distills the essence of the writer's career and character to help prompt consideration of literary merit and relationships by the reader. Among the 100 writers chosen are Jame Austen, Samuel Beckett, Emily Bronte, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Homer, James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Herman Melville, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Virgil, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats.