Top 50 Literary Figures of all Time

In a recent blog article by theguardian, they asked the question: Who are the most significant literary figures in history?

It is interesting to note that Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson are the only women to make it into this top 50 list. Here is the list below:

1 William Shakespeare (4)

2 Charles Dickens (33)

3 Mark Twain (53)

4 Edgar Allan Poe (54)

5 Voltaire (64)

6 Oscar Wilde (77)

7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (88)

8 Dante Alighieri (96)

9 Lewis Carroll (118)

10 Henry David Thoreau (131)

11 Jane Austen (139)

12 Samuel Johnson (141)

13 Homer (152)

14 Lord Byron (158)

15 Walt Whitman (160)

16 John Milton (165)

17 Geoffrey Chaucer (173)

18 Virgil (177)

19 William Wordsworth (182)

20 Stephen King (191)

21 Emily Dickinson (194)

22 Leo Tolstoy (196)

23 Victor Hugo (208)

24 George Bernard Shaw (213)

25 Nathaniel Hawthorne (227)

26 Fyodor Dostoyevsky (244)

27 Miguel de Cervantes (246)

28 Ernest Hemingway (248)

29 HG Wells (249)

30 Herman Melville (251)

31 Rudyard Kipling (259)

32 Sophocles (274)

33 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (280)

34 John Keats (305)

35 Robert Burns (317)

36 Petrarch (326)

37 Percy Bysshe Shelley (329)

38 George Orwell (342)

39 Christopher Marlowe (374)

40 Thomas Hardy (378)

41 Aeschylus (386)

42 Jonathan Swift (391)

43 Rabindranath Tagore (397)

44 Henrik Ibsen (403)

45 James Joyce (406)

46 Henry James (408)

47 Aristophanes (418)

48 Alexander Pushkin (420)

49 Ben Jonson (421)

50 TS Eliot (436)

What do you think? Do you agree with this list? Leave your comments and thoughts below.