Selected by piero scaruffi
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Best novels ever
| Best poetry
| Best theater
National literatures
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| AGE
1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 | ....SPANISH....
Cervantes (1547) Lope de Vega (1562) Quevedo (1580) Calderon (1600) Perez Galdos (1843) Dario (*1867) Jimenez (1881) Garcia Lorca (1898) Borges (*1899) Neruda (*1904) Carpentier (*1904) Sabato (*1911) Cortazar (*1914) Paz (*1914) Donoso (*1925) Garcia Marquez (*1927) Goytisolo (1931) Vargas Llosa (*1936) Bolano (*1953) (*) = in America | PORTUGUESE
Camoes (1524) Assis (1839) Queiros (1845) Machado (*1875) Pessoa (1888) Meireles (*1901) Lispector (*1920) Bessa-Luis (1922) Saramago (1922) (*) = in Brazil | ......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) Morante (1912) Zanzotto (1921) Calvino (1923) Ferrante (1943) | AGE
1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 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) Perec (1936) | ..GERMAN..
Goethe (1749) Schiller (1759) Holderlin (1770) Kleist (1771) Novalis (1772) Heine (1797) Hoffmann (1776) Buchner (1813) Schnitzler (1862) Wedekind (1864) Rilke (1875) Mann (1875) Hesse (1877) Musil (1880) Kafka (1883) Brecht (1898) Canetti (1905) Durrenmatt(1921) Bernhard (1931) Jelinek (1946) | ....ENGLISH....
Chaucer (1340) Spenser (1552) Marlowe (1564) Shakespeare (1564) Donne (1572) Milton (1608) Swift (1667) Blake (1757) Wordsworth (1770) Austen (1775) Dickens (1812) Bronte (1818) G. Eliot (1819) Hardy (1840) Shaw (1856) Conrad (1857) Yeats (1865) Joyce (1882) Woolf (1882) Pinter (1930) Byatt (1936) Heaney (1939) Mantel (1952) Ishiguro (1954) | ....ENGLISH....
Melville ($1819) James ($1843) Tagore (*1861) Stevens ($1879) Pound ($1885) T.S. Eliot ($1888) Fitzgerald ($1896) Faulkner ($1897) Nabokov ($1899) White (#1912) Gordimer (#1923) Frame (#1924) Bellow ($1915) Gaddis ($1922) Ashbery ($1927) Barth ($1930) Walcott (%1930) Morrison ($1931) McCarthy ($1933) Soyinka (&1934) DeLillo ($1936) Pynchon ($1937) Rushdie (*1947) ($) = in North America (*) = in India (#) = in Oceania (&) = in Africa (%) = Caribbeans | AGE
1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 | ...GREEK/BALKAN...
Seferis (1900) Ritsos (1909) Elytis (1911) Kis (1935) Kadare (1936) Cartarescu (1956) | ......RUSSIAN......
Pushkin (1799) Gogol (1809) Turgenev (1818) Dostoevskij (1821) Tolstoj (1828) Cechov (1860) Blok (1880) Bely (1880) Achmatova (1889) Pasternak (1890) Mandelstam (1891) Bulgakov (1891) Majakovskij (1893) Grossman (1905) Yevtushenko (1933) Brodsky (1940) Sokolov (1943) | ....POLISH....
Norwid (1821) Witkiewicz (1885) Gombrowicz (1904) Milosz (1911) Lem (1921) Herbert (1924) Tokarczuk (1962) | HUNGARIAN
Nadas (1942) Krasznahorkai (1954) | ....CZECH....
Holan (1905) Kundera (1929) | SCANDINAVIAN
Ibsen (1828) Strindberg (1849) Lagerlof (1858) Under (1883) Hultberg (Denmark, 1935) | AGE
1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 | ..CHINESE..
Cao Xueqin (171#) Gao Xingjian (1940) Yan Lianke (1958) | ..JAPANESE..
Tanizaki (1886) Mishima (1925) Murakami (1949) | MIDDLE EAST
Ferdowsi (940) Khayyam (1050) Nezami (1140) Rumi (1207) Hafez (1324) Singer (1904) Adonis (1930) | AGE
1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 |
The columns are rough approximations.
Writers are grouped by the language in which they wrote. The country that today owns the region in which they lived might be completely different (e.g., Ireland is now independent of Britain, Czech Republic is independent of Austria) and some countries did not even exist when these writers lived (Germany and Italy were only born in the late 19th century). Austrians write in German. Conrad (Polish) is listed under "English" because he wrote in English, and so are all Irish and US and Australian writers. Kafka (Czech) is under "German". This page is not the place to find out where a writer was born or lived, just a summary of the writers that I consider most important classified by language.
Go to the timelines for the real thing.