War and Peace question

The “most important, influential, definitive”? I reject this criteria for my list of the best novelists of all time. Often a novelist who did something for the first time is given great weight with this criteria. I am not interested in who was the most innovative or who defied the standards of their day.I am also not interested in satire, farce, or sci-fi. For this list I have also left off playwrights and poets with one exception, Pushkin, whose novel in verse is worthy of inclusion. My criteria: the novelist has created work(s) that withstands the test of time. It is transcendent because of great storytelling, exceptional writing, its portrayals of the human condition, powerful drama or insightful intellectual discourse, and sublime use of language.“Representative work” here means a novel I have read and that I submit as being exemplary. One great novel is enough; I am not elevating any novelist because of the volume of their writing. One great novel is enough to belong on the list. These are novels so good that you can’t put them down and you are sorry when they are over! The contemporary novelists on the list may be the most controversial because there are so many writers to choose from and I have not read them all.Please make your case for any changes or additions. I reserve the right to make edits as I become better informed.

In chronological order of publication (of the representative work), here are the top 44:

Daniel Defoe born Daniel Foe; c. 1660 – 24 April 1731
Representative Work: Robinson Crusoe - 1719

Samuel Richardson; 19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761
Representative Work: Clarrisa; or The History of a Young Lady - 1748

Pierre Choderlos De Laclos; c. August 1689 – 4 July 1761
Representative Work: Dangerous Liaisons - 1782

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James Fenimore Cooper; September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851
Representative Work: The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 - 1826

Emily Jane Brontë; 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848
Representative Work: Wuthering Heights - 1847

Charles John Huffam Dickens; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870
Representative Work: David Copperfield - 1850

Herman Melville; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891
Representative Work: Moby Dick - 1851

Victor-Marie Hugo; 6 February 1802 – 22 May 1885
Representative Work: Les Misérables - 1862

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy; 9 September 1828 – 20 November 1910
Representative Work: War and Peace - 1869

Mary Ann Evans/pen name Geroge Eliot; 22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880
Representative Work: Middlemarch - 1872

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky; 11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881
Representative Work: The Brothers Karamazov - 1880

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin; 6 June 1799 - 10 February 1837
Representative Work: Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse - 1833

Samuel Langhorne Clemens/pen name Mark Twain; November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910
Representative Work: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - 1884

Thomas Hardy OM; 2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928
Representative Work: Tess of the d’Urbervilles - 1891

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John Griffith Chaney/pen name Jack London; January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916
Representative Work: Call of the Wild- 1903

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922
Representative Work: Swann’s Way, Remembrances of Things Past- 1913

Paul Thomas Mann; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955
Representative Work: Magic Mountain - 1924

William Somerset Maugham; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965
Representative Work: The Painted Veil - 1925

Ernest Miller Hemingway; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961
Representative Work: The Sun also Rises - 1926

D.H. Lawrence
Representative Work: Lady Chatterley’s Lover - 1929

Henry Valentine Miller; December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980
Representative Work: Tropic of Cancer - 1934

William Cuthbert Faulkner; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962
Representative Work: Absalom, Absalom - 1936

Zora Neale Hurston; January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960
Representative Work: Their Eyes Were Watching God - 1937

Yasunari Kawabata; 11 June 1899 – 16 April 1972
Representative Work: Snow Country - 1937

Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning; 13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989
Representative Work: Rebecca - 1938

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov; 15 May 1891 – 10 March 1940
Representative Work: The Master and Margarita - 1940

Richard Nathaniel Wright; September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960
Representative Work: Native Son - 1940

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966
Representative Work: Brideshead Revistied 1945

John Ernst Steinbeck; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968)
Representative Work: East of Eden - 1952

Ralph Ellison; March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994
Representative Work: Invisible Man - 1953

Mary Flannery O'Connor; March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964
Representative Work: A Good Man is Hard to Find - 1955

Nelle Harper Lee; April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016
Representative Work: To Kill a Mockingbird - 1960

Kōbō Abe/pen name of Kimifusa Abe; March 7, 1924 – January 22, 1993
Representative Work: The Woman in the Dunes - 1962

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez; 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014
Representative Work: One Hundred Years of Solitude - 1967

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019
Representative Work: The Bluest Eye - 1970

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie; born 19 June 1947
Representative Work: Midnight’s Children - 1981

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro; born 8 November 1954
Representative Work: Remains of the Day - 1989


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Donna Louise Tartt; born December 23, 1963)
Representative Work: The Little Friend - 2002

Markus Zusak; born 23 June 1975
Representative Work: The Book Thief - 2005

Tan Twan Eng; born 1972
Representative Work: The Gift of Rain - 2007

Amor Towles; born 1964
Representative Work: A Gentleman in Moscow - 2016

Madeline Miller; born July 24, 1978
Representative Work: Circe - 2018

Ann Patchett; born December 2, 1963
Representative Work: The Dutch House - 2019

Barbara Kingsolver; born April 8, 1955
Representative Work: Demon Copperhead - 2022