The Greatest Writers of all Time

(I piu` grandi scrittori di tutti i tempi)

Selected by piero scaruffi | Back to the Fiction page
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AGE

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1900 		........SPANISH.......








Cervantes (1547)
Lope de Vega (1562)
Quevedo (1580)
Calderon (1600)












Perez Galdos (1843)





Jimenez (1881)


Garcia Lorca (1898) 		..HISPANIC..



























Dario (1867)





Borges (1899)
Neruda (1904)
Carpentier (1904)
Cortazar (1914)
Paz (1914)

Marquez (1928)




Vargas Llosa (1936) 		PORTUGUESE








Camoes (1524)















Assis (1839)
Queiros (1845)




Machado (1875)
Pessoa (1888)









Saramago (1922) 		......ITALIAN....


Dante (1265)
Petrarca (1304)
Boccaccio (1313)

Ariosto (1474)








Goldoni (1707)





Leopardi (1798)



Pascoli (1855)
Svevo (1861)
Pirandello (1867)




Gadda (1893)
Montale (1896)

Pavese (1908)



Zanzotto (1921)
Calvino (1923) 		AGE

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1900 		....FRENCH....

Chretien (11xx)



Villon (1431)
Rabelais (1494)





Moliere (1622)

Voltaire (1694)





Stendhal (1783)
Balzac (1799)
Hugo (1802)
Baudelaire (1821)
Flaubert (1821)
Zola (1840)
Mallarme` (1842)
Rimbaud (1854)
Gide (1869)
Proust (1871)
Valery (1871)
Cocteau (1889)
Celine (1894)


Sartre (1905)
Beckett (1906)
Camus (1913) 		..GERMAN..
















Goethe (1749)
Schiller (1759)
Holderlin (1770)
Kleist (1771)
Novalis (1772)
Heine (1797)
Hoffmann (1809)
Buchner (1813)

Schnitzler (1862)
Wedekind (1864)
Rilke (1875)
Mann (1875)
Hesse (1877)
Musil (1880)
Kafka (1883)

Brecht (1898)
Canetti (1905)




Durrenmatt(1921)


Bernhard (1931) 		....ENGLISH....




Chaucer (1340)



Spenser (1552)
Marlowe (1564)
Shakespeare (1564)
Donne (1572)
Milton (1608)

Swift (1667)



Blake (1757)
Wordsworth (1770)


Dickens (1812)
Bronte (1818)
G. Eliot (1819)
Hardy (1840)
Hopkins (1844)
Shaw (1856)
Conrad (1857)
Yeats (1865)

Joyce (1882)
Woolf (1882)









Pinter (1930)
Heaney (1939) 		......U.S.A.......























Melville (1819)


James (1843)

Stevens (1879)
Pound (1885)
T.S. Eliot (1888)
Fitzgerald (1896)
Faulkner (1897)
Nabokov (1899)



Bellow (1915)

Gaddis (1922)

Ashbery (1927)
Barth (1930)
Pynchon (1937)

Morrison (1942) 		AGE

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1900 		....GREEK...



































Seferis (1900)
Ritsos (1909)
Elitis (1911) 		......RUSSIAN......





















Pushkin (1799)
Gogol (1809)
Turgenev (1818)
Dostoevskij (1821)
Tolstoj (1828)
Cechov (1860)
Gorkij (1868)
Blok (1880)
Achmatova (1889)
Pasternak (1890)
Mandelstam (1891)
Bulgakov (1891)
Majakovskij (1893)








Yevtushenko (1933)

Brodsky (1940) 		....POLISH....
























Norwid (1821)




Witkiewicz (1885)


Gombrowicz (1904)
Milosz (1911)
Lem (1921)
Herbert (1924) 		HUNGARIAN













































Krasznahorkai (1954) 		....CZECH....

































Holan (1905)





Kundera (1929) 		SCANDINAVIAN
























Ibsen (1828)
Strindberg (1849)
Lagerlof (1858)



Under (1883) 		AGE

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1900 		ANGLOPHONES


























Tagore (1861)








White (1912)



Walcott (1930)
Soyinka (1934)


Rushdie (1947) 		..JAPANESE..






























Tanizaki (1886)













Murakami (1949) 		....HEBREW....



































Singer (1904)






Oz (1939) 		....PERSIAN.... Ferdowsi (940)
Omar Khayyam (1050)
Nezami (1140)
Rumi (1207)
Hafez (1324) 		AGE

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The columns are rough approximations. Writers are grouped by the language in which they wrote. The country that today owns the city in which they were born might be completely different (e.g., Ireland is now independent of Britain, Czech Republic is independent of Germany) and some countries did not even exist when these writers lived (Germany and Italy were only born in the 1870s). So Conrad (Polish) is listed under Britain because he wrote in English, and so are all Irish writers. Kafka (Czech) is under Germany. Etc. I split Spanish and Hispanic, English and USA and Anglophones because there were too many for one column. This page is not the place to find out where a writer was born, just a summary of the writers that I consider most important. Go to the timelines for the real thing.