Famous Writers: Ranked by Popularity (Page 10 of 20) | Who Shares My BirthdayThe most famous writers in history, ranked by historical popularity: novelists, poets and playwrights with their birthdays and best-known works.A writer becomes notable when their words keep finding new readers. Many of the names on this list wrote books, poems or plays that are still taught in schools, translated into dozens of languages and adapted for stage and screen. Others shaped how people think about politics, faith or society.This list covers the novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists and other authors in our database, from ancient poets to contemporary bestsellers. We rank them by historical popularity rather than by literary prizes, so the order shows whose work and lives the world still reads about most.Who is included: everyone in our database whose primary occupation matches this list. Each person must have an English Wikipedia article and a full date of birth recorded on Wikidata. A growing share of people also have an original profile, written to our editorial rules and marked with a Last reviewed date.Most famous writer: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Highest historical popularity score (HPI 93.2).Most common birth month: November. 93 of 973 were born in November.Living vs deceased: 134 / 839. 14% are still living.Most common nationality: American. 193 people, 20% of the list.Editor-written profiles: 307. 32% have a full original profile so far.451. Antoine François Prévost (1697–1763), French: Priest and novelist who wrote Manon Lescaut, a tragic love story that inspired operas by Massenet and Puccini.452. Georges Perec (1936–1982), French: Wrote the experimental novel La Disparition, a full-length book composed without using the letter e.453. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695), Mexican: Hieronymite nun in colonial Mexico whose poems and plays, and her defence of women's education, earned her the title "The Tenth Muse".454. Su Shi (1037–1101), Northern Song dynasty: Song dynasty poet and official, known as Dongpo, whose verse, prose, calligraphy and the Red Cliff poems remain widely admired in China.455. Robert Burns (1759–1796), British: Scotland's national poet, who wrote Auld Lang Syne and Tam o' Shanter, celebrated each year at Burns Night suppers.456. bell hooks (1952–2021), American: Cultural critic and author whose books, including Ain't I a Woman, examined race, gender and class, and who taught at Berea College.457. Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932), Austrian: Austrian writer and banker whose eerie novel The Golem, set in Prague's Jewish quarter, became a landmark of supernatural fiction.458. Paul Lafargue (1842–1911), French: Socialist writer and activist, son-in-law of Karl Marx, whose pamphlet The Right to Be Lazy attacked the glorification of work.459. Alfred de Musset (1810–1857), French: French Romantic poet and dramatist of Lorenzaccio and Les Nuits, and lover of George Sand.460. Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), Russian: Poet whose intense lyrics and long work Poem of the End mark a peak of Russian modernism.461. Kazuo Ishiguro (1954), British: Novelist who wrote The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, and received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature.462. Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958), German: Wrote the historical novel Jud Süß, and later Exile, becoming one of Weimar Germany's best-known novelists.463. Ellen G. White (1827–1915), American: Author and prophetic figure who co-founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church and wrote The Great Controversy and Steps to Christ.464. Dino Buzzati (1906–1972), Italian: Journalist at Corriere della Sera who wrote the novel The Tartar Steppe, a haunting tale of waiting and wasted time.465. Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), Prussian: Wrote the fairy-tale comedy Puss in Boots and helped complete the Schlegel-Tieck German translation of Shakespeare.466. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803), French: Army officer who wrote the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, a chilling study of seduction and manipulation among the aristocracy.467. Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008), French: Leading figure of the Nouveau Roman who wrote the novel Jealousy and the screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad.468. Amin Maalouf (1949), Lebanese: Author of The Rock of Tanios, which won the Prix Goncourt, and of Leo Africanus.469. Harold Pinter (1930–2008), British: Playwright of The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, famed for menacing pauses, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.470. Han Kang (1970), South Korean: South Korean novelist who won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian and later received the Nobel Prize in Literature.471. Raymond Queneau (1903–1976), French: Co-founded Oulipo and wrote Exercises in Style, retelling one trivial incident in ninety-nine different ways.472. Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), American: Wrote the naturalist novel Sister Carrie and later An American Tragedy, a landmark of early twentieth-century American fiction.473. Joan Fuster (1922–1991), Spanish: Valencian essayist whose book Nosaltres els valencians argued for a shared Catalan cultural identity across the Valencian Country.474. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), American: Creator of Tarzan, the jungle hero who appeared in more than twenty novels and countless later adaptations.475. Francisco Quevedo (1580–1645), Spanish: Baroque satirist best known for the picaresque novel El Buscón and his sharp, witty poetry.476. Franz Werfel (1890–1945), American: Wrote The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel about Armenian resistance, and also The Song of Bernadette.477. Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995), American: Created the amoral charmer Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley and wrote Strangers on a Train.478. André Chénier (1762–1794), French: Poet guillotined during the Terror, remembered for verses such as La Jeune Captive.479. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), British: Writer who compiled A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 and was immortalised in Boswell's biography.480. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), British: Poet who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and, with Wordsworth, produced Lyrical Ballads, a landmark of English Romanticism.481. Kōbō Abe (1924–1993), Japanese: Experimental novelist whose surreal book The Woman in the Dunes was adapted into an acclaimed film by Hiroshi Teshigahara.482. A. J. Cronin (1896–1981), British: Former doctor whose novel The Citadel drew on his medical career and helped inspire the creation of the National Health Service.483. Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), American: Beat poet whose long poem Howl provoked an obscenity trial and helped define a generation.484. Anton Makarenko (1888–1939), Soviet: Soviet educator who ran the Gorky Colony for young offenders and described his collective method in The Road to Life.485. Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), British: Clergyman and comic novelist who wrote the digressive, inventive Tristram Shandy, published in volumes over nearly a decade.486. Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), Italian: Italian poet whose collection Ossi di seppia made his name and who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975.487. Klaus Mann (1906–1949), American: Anti-Nazi writer and exile whose novel Mephisto portrayed an opportunistic actor who thrives under the Third Reich.488. Alexander Pope (1688–1744), British: Satirical poet who wrote The Rape of the Lock and produced a celebrated English translation of Homer's Iliad.489. Jon Fosse (1959), Norwegian: Norwegian dramatist and novelist whose spare, rhythmic plays and prose earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023.490. Vicente Aleixandre (1898–1984), Spanish: Spanish poet of the Generation of '27 who won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature.491. Karl Kraus (1874–1936), Austrian: Viennese satirist who edited the journal Die Fackel and wrote the vast anti-war play The Last Days of Mankind.492. Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), Polish: Polish-Jewish writer and artist whose story collection The Street of Crocodiles is celebrated for its dreamlike, inventive prose.493. Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916), Belgian: Belgian poet writing in French who helped found Symbolism, noted for collections such as Les Campagnes hallucinées.494. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), American: Wrote the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, which stirred northern opinion before the American Civil War.495. Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), Italian: Wrote the poetry collection Canti and the prose Operette morali, expressing a deeply pessimistic view of life.496. Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973), Austrian: Austrian poet whose collection "Die gestundete Zeit" made her name, and who won the Büchner Prize in 1964.497. Alvin Toffler (1928–2016), American: Futurist whose bestseller Future Shock warned of the strain caused by accelerating technological change.498. Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), Mexican: Mexican novelist whose The Death of Artemio Cruz made him a central figure of the Latin American Boom.499. Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957), Italian: Wartime correspondent whose harrowing novels Kaputt and The Skin depicted Europe's moral collapse during the Second World War.500. Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), Spanish: Baroque poet whose dense, ornate verse in Solitudes and the Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea defined culteranismo.How we rank and selectRanking: people are ordered by their Historical Popularity Index (HPI) from Pantheon. HPI combines how many Wikipedia language editions have an article about a person, how many page views those articles get, how evenly the views are spread across languages and how long ago the person lived. People Pantheon does not yet cover are listed after them, ordered by our own popularity score (the number of Wikipedia language editions with an article about them).Membership: each person appears in one occupation list only, based on their primary occupation as classified by Pantheon (for example, a queen who wrote poetry is listed as royalty, not as a writer). Kings, queens, emperors, sultans and royal consorts are not listed as politicians or writers: anyone who held a monarch's office on Wikidata, and never served as a president or head of government, counts as royalty. For the few people Pantheon does not cover, we use the primary field recorded in our database.One-line summaries: each summary is an original line written for this site with AI assistance under our editorial rules, then checked against the Wikipedia introduction so no wording is copied.Statistics: every figure on this page is calculated live from our database each time the page loads, so it changes as we add people.Last reviewed: October 2026Sources: Pantheon: Historical Popularity Index (HPI) rankings, Wikidata: birth dates, death dates and occupations, Wikipedia: biographies behind our summaries and popularity scores. Who Shares My Birthday.

Antoine François Prévost

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Alfred de Musset

Marina Tsvetaeva

Lion Feuchtwanger

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Raymond Queneau

Theodore Dreiser

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Francisco Quevedo

Patricia Highsmith

André Chénier

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Anton Makarenko

Laurence Sterne

Eugenio Montale

Vicente Aleixandre

Emile Verhaeren

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Giacomo Leopardi

Ingeborg Bachmann

Curzio Malaparte

Luis de Góngora

Who Shares My Birthday.

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Famous Writers

The best-known novelists, poets and playwrights in our archive, ranked by historical popularity.

974 writers in our database, ranked by historical popularity. Page 10 of 20.

Most famous writer

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Highest historical popularity score (HPI 93.2)

Most common birth month

November

93 of 974 were born in November

Living vs deceased

135 / 839

14% are still living

Most common nationality

American

194 people, 20% of the list

Editor-written profiles

307

32% have a full original profile so far

The ranked list (from #451)

How we rank and select

Ranking: people are ordered by their Historical Popularity Index (HPI) from Pantheon. HPI combines how many Wikipedia language editions have an article about a person, how many page views those articles get, how evenly the views are spread across languages and how long ago the person lived. People Pantheon does not yet cover are listed after them, ordered by our own popularity score (the number of Wikipedia language editions with an article about them).
Membership: each person appears in one occupation list only, based on their primary occupation as classified by Pantheon (for example, a queen who wrote poetry is listed as royalty, not as a writer). Kings, queens, emperors, sultans and royal consorts are not listed as politicians or writers: anyone who held a monarch's office on Wikidata, and never served as a president or head of government, counts as royalty. For the few people Pantheon does not cover, we use the primary field recorded in our database.
One-line summaries: each summary is an original line written for this site with AI assistance under our editorial rules, then checked against the Wikipedia introduction so no wording is copied.
Statistics: every figure on this page is calculated live from our database each time the page loads, so it changes as we add people.

Further reading

Reviewed by the Who Shares My Birthday editorial team.

Last reviewed: October 2026

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