Compiled through consultation with literary scholars, provides a survey of writers who have had a profound impact on literature and the world, examining each writer's life, career, and lasting legacy.

Daniel S. Burt holds a Ph.D. from New York University with a specialty in Victorian fiction and was for nine years a dean at Wesleyan University, where he has also taught literature courses since 1989

Author Daniel S. Burt has compiled a compelling assessment of the 100 most influential novelists, playwrights and poets of 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:
Jane Austen
Samuel Beckett
Emily Brontë
Geoffrey Chaucer
Charles Dickens
John Donne
T. S. Eliot
Ralph Ellison
Homer
James Joyce
Gabriel García Márquez
Herman Melville
Vladimir Nabokov
Pablo Neruda
Marcel Proust
William Shakespeare
Gertrude Stein
Leo Tolstoy
Mark Twain
Virgil
Walt Whitman
Oscar Wilde
Virginia Woolf
William Butler Yeats.