You can find the first quarter of our 100 Greatest Writers of All Time list here.

Ezra Pound photographed by Richard AvedonThe 100 Greatest Writers of All Time: 75-51

by WILL HUBBARD AND ALEX CARNEVALE

The list rolls on, and we get more excited about these masters. Other lists of this kind have been attempted, none very successfully. We would like to stress that there is a crucial difference between "an important writer" and "a great writer"; the latter is at this time our sole interest. We will account for some of the names that did not make this list in a later dispatch. There is nothing bad to say about anyone we list here, except in some cases that they were anti-Semitic or racist, hated women or hated men. Literary crimes are usually relative, the caveats of which we shall enumerate:

75. Ezra Pound

Somewhere between the worst person who was a great poet and the greatest poet who was an asshole sits Pound. After living with Yeats in Stone Cottage, Ezra Pound married an artist named Dorothy Shakespear. Previously, he had been engaged to Hilda Doolittle. In Paris, Hemingway taught him to box, but he decided to become a composer instead. He fell in love with the only violinist who could make sense of his compositions. Later, in Italy, the two would try (and fail) to write a detective novel in the manner of Agatha Chrystie. He then spent 25 days in a cage outside Pisa for hating the country of his birth. His poetic innovations and sense of the lyric are actually somewhat underrated, and The Cantos must be the great long poem of the 20th century. It will never be in Oprah's Book Club, but then again neither will any book of serious poetry. The first 50 copies were printed on lambskin.

74. Philip K. Dick

Oh Philip was the conjurer, the mad genius. The completely humane. In The Man in the High Castle he dismissed fascism with the cautious wave of a hand. Was he the greatest prose stylist on two feet? No, but he had his pathos—the lost, last moments of A Scanner Darkly, the incredible pull of Ubik. He was like a free object spinning in zero gravity: Radio Free Albemuth; his stories are so endlessly inventive it is like he was starting them from scratch. Paranoid fuck.

73. Percy Shelley

Attended Oxford; read sixteen hours a day. It worked—he would write lively novels, and poems that were representative of the time and the place, and went beyond it. Seems to have survived his Wordsworth obsession, as many after him would not. He wasn't that popular during his lifetime, but his reputation lived on, and his work would remain a touchstone for poets and fiction writers in the two centuries after his death. Recommended reading: of the lyrics, we prefer "Ozymandias" and "Ode to the West Wind"; the long-form and dramatic verse reached their apices with Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci; the early Gothic novels, most notably, Zastrozzi, are a good companion on a stormy autumn night, but you'll never find a copy.

72. James Agee

The foremost journalist of his era, he also wrote a tremendous novel, A Death in the Family, and the bible of creative nonfiction, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Had an important side career as a screenwriter; but in the main he wrote many of Life magazine's most enduring pieces with Whittaker Chambers. One of those sad, great-looking literary demigods who died in a taxi cab before his 50th birthday.

71. Stanley Elkin

The greatest American comic novelist, Elkin was one of the smartest people ever to live. His stories are a blossoming achievement, a dramatic victory of non-realism in the dreary bog of American fiction. He is incredibly underappreciated and all of his novels deserve revisiting. It was in the stories that he really shined, always avoiding the easy resolution, always being more moral with other people than he would be with himself. He was a master critic, a polished prose stylist. Recommended reading: Mrs. Ted Bliss, Searches and Seizures, The Franchiser, A Bad Man.

70. Walter Benjamin

A German Jew who redefined how the essay should operate. Was killed by Germans in a hotel room running from the Nazis, or he could have just committed suicide. Translated Proust and Baudelaire. His ideas about art pretty much all came true, eventually. Skilled consumer of hashish, of bearing down on some truth you did not know was there but would have come to the surface eventually, probably, without him.

69. Harold Pinter

The greatest English dramatist of his time, we have taken so much from his clipped ways of saying, his extraordinary grasp of how the theater operates and how it ought to operate. His ideas have been stolen by Larry David and Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, a testament to their timeliness. Married to Antonia Fraser, his political views weren't always to my taste, but he was a fierce proponent of freedom at home and abroad, and helped many writers on that account. Recommended reading: The Dumb Waiter, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, his novel The Dwarfs.

68. John Berryman

The Dream Songs is one of the top 5 poetry manuscripts ever written, bringing character and voice to new hights in American verse. He was born in 1914, he committed suicide in 1972. The between years were drunk and hard, but the poetry came easy. His father killed himself when he was 12, from that he basically never recovered. Recommended reading: Dream Song 34.

67. James Baldwin

Born in Harlem, he was gay, black and brilliant. His novel Go Tell It On The Mountain is a work of incredible depth and sensitivity, probably the second-best novel of the 1950s and one of the ten greatest novels of all time. His short story "Sonny's Blues" might be best remembered. It holds up better than any short story you'll find in a rag like The New Yorker. He needs a renaissance more badly than most.

66. Tu Fu

The greatest of the Chinese poets, he is a master in any time. Chinese schoolchildren still recite his verses, as do their businessmen. Claimed to have lived in a "straw hut," but really it was just another one of those upper-middle class two story affairs on a whispering brook like they had in those days. Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems From the Chinese is pitch-perfect, and includes all of the memorable Tu Fu.

65. Jorge Luis Borges

A blind, deep thinker. His stories are endlessly rewarding and entertaining. The genre of science fiction virtually does not exist without him. Astounding how often a gunshot or a stab wound ends these tales, but still, Comp Lit programs across the Northeast would be a lot poorer, and certainly a lot less sexy, were it not for this man.

64. Malcolm Lowry

He was a crazy and he was a drunk, but he managed to outwrite most of the non-crazies and non-drunks despite spending his days chronicly impoverished. Under the Volcano is up there with Ulysses, with Molloy, with Light in August. Its narration is unchallenged for veracity of human feeling and expression. He was never much good at living, but through his work he'll live on for centuries.

63. Willa Cather

An American lesbian. She was Episcopal, an American original. The glories can be found in The Song of the Lark, O Pioneers!, The Professor's House. Her ways were sometimes new, sometimes old. She wrote about the people that existed, that she knew, that had never before made it to these pages. Recommended reading: Death Comes For the Archbishop, My Antonia.

62. Edgar Allan Poe

Horror we needed, craved. The short story was brought to entertain in his mode, the beating heart someplace you weren't sure was there, his inventiveness and sense of menace. An American simultaneously at its most base and most necessary. The poetry is repetitive but sublime, largely centered upon his 13 year old cousin, whom he married. Our kingdom by the sea, indeed.

61. Henrik Ibsen

Torvald! He was a master of character, of menace. His drama was challenging, exciting, and his outlook was more shits and giggles than devotion and God. Extremely prolific, he managed so many excellent dramas, slamming Victorian morality, forging his own. Recommended reading: Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Master Builder.

60. W.H. Auden

He was the most acclaimed poet in the world while he lived. He seems sort of old-fashioned now, but that doesn't dim his impossibly wide view of human existence, his innate knowledge of history, his incredible sense of the possibilities of the lyric. It is now assumed that he was gay, but how, really, could a poet of his time not be. Students of verse should be forced to transcribe, memorize, and possible have tatooed on their rib cage Mr. Auden's September 1, 1939. Just a tremendous poem, a model of unacknowledged legislation.

59. Thomas Pynchon

An enterprising American fabulist whose self-imposed retreat from the public sphere probably venerates him more than it should. Mason & Dixon could be praised or reviled; it was a massively courageous undertaking, a screaming across the sky. Worked at Boeing for a time. After publishing V. the greatest first novel ever by a human, he wrote to his agent. "If they come out on paper anything like they are inside my head then it will be the literary event of the millennium."

58. Emily Brontë/Charlotte Brontë

The first wrote Wuthering Heights, which has survived more splendidly than any story we can think of. She barely lived long enough to write anything else, but what else exactly did she need to write? She'd written Wuthering Heights: that was enough. The second discovered her sister's talents, and became the more prolific of the two.

57. Flannery O'Connor

She was a faithful practitioner of an emerging style, a slyness, an understanding, that exposed the depth of human character in her moral gaze. Redefined the American short story, repudiated the saccharrine elements that had defined it and gave fiction a seriousness of purpose that resonates decades after her passing. Recommended reading: "Everything That Rises Must Converge", Wise Blood, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find"

56. Leo Tolstoy

Born to the aristocracy of Russia. His cousin was Alexander Pushkin. Managed to pen Anna Karenina, the greatest novel ever written in Russian. Flaubert said, "What an artist and what a psychologist!" His endings were legend, his characterizations revolutionary. He was an accomplished political writer, and espoused nonviolent resistance. His autobiographers are very dated, but his correspondence has held up far better. Maxim Gorky's "Reminiscences of Tolstoy" is the only way to know this talented, magical novelist, this anchor for Russian literature as the world knows it.

55. Tennessee Williams

The nature of his art was evident from the very first. You could walk into a performance of one of his plays and you would know instantly that it belonged to him. His characters were darts of light, flickering across the stage, surprising even themselves. His sister was a schizophrenic, his lover was a Sicilian navy man. He brought his tendrils of genius to wherever and whenever he was. He choked on cap from a bottle and perished in 1983, the year we were born. His short stories are surprisingly revealing, like a Rosetta Stone for the sheer madness of his plays. Love the one-acts.

54. Nathaniel Hawthorne

Why did America become the finest country the world had seen to that point? Its artists played a crucial role. In his incredibly perceptive stories and novels, Hawthorne achieved heights that were reserved for the European masters before he brought his insight to bear on them. We'll never forgive him for how he treated Melville late in their lives, but the penning of phantasmagorias like "Young Goodman Brown" are enough to forgive most of his other personal failings. We've always though that the crimson A in The Scarlet Letter stood not for Adultery but for American, and it makes sense—we would be living in a different country were it not for this book.

53. T.S. Eliot

Terrible playwright. Also, it's probably about time for everybody to admit that The Waste Land is totally boring. Four Quartets, on the other hand, is enduring poetry. As are a handful of his other shorter lyrics, and probably the one about J. A. Prufrock. The twentieth century would have been more beautiful had he not lived, but still, the twentieth century happened the way it did, largely because of him. Oh wait, that was Hitler. Same difference.

52. Sophocles

Born a few years before the battle of Marathon, he would be the second of three playwrights to rock the ancient world to its core. Banged many young boys in his times, the greatest writer-pedophile who ever lived. The magic of the Theban plays; the lyricism of Oedipus, psychology's first tragic hero. In even dealing with myth strived towards naturalism, beginning the slow march towards the reality of things. Recommended reading: Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus.

51. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

His drama Faust begins in Heaven, has a poodle turning into the devil. He was born in Frankfurt in 1749, and he'd live long, to the age of 82. He became an international celebrity at the age of 24 with the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther, a fact he would live the rest of his life regretting.

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. You can visit the This Recording tumblr here. Tune in tomorrow for the penultimate 25 entries in our list.

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The 100 Greatest Writers of All Time: 100-76

by WILL HUBBARD and ALEX CARNEVALE

Other lists of this kind have been attempted, none very successfully. We would like to stress that there is a crucial difference between "an important writer" and "a great writer"; the latter is at this time our sole interest. We will account for some of the names that did not make this list in a later dispatch. There is nothing bad to say about anyone we list here, except in some cases that they were anti-Semitic or racist, hated women or hated men. Literary crimes are usually relative, the caveats of which we shall enumerate:

100. Joseph Conrad

Prose stylist nonpareil, he addressed the dichotomy of race, the loneliness of existence. Heart of Darkness became a paradigmatic work. It is hard to read today, but no less important. Conrad was born to a family of Polish nobles. He did quite a bit of gunrunning — see The Arrow of Gold. You've got to be batshit crazy to have an ambition, as a child, to visit Central Africa. Recommended reading: The Secret Agent.

99. Honoré de Balzac

The gestamtkunstwerk ('total work of art') was all the rage in Europe early in the last century, but Balzac was on the case almost a hundred years before. The man started writing just before midnight and worked until the sun went down the next day, eventually producing 100 novels and plays he called La Comedie Humaine. We've never really liked realism, but Le Pere Goriot is one of the mode's best. His mother came from a family of haberdashers. There had to be a realism before there could be anything else, probably. Recommended reading: "The Girl With The Golden Eye", "The Marriage Contract" from La Comedie Humaine.
 

98. Czeslaw Milosz

The greatest artist Poland would ever spawn, Milosz was still composing vital poetry until his death in 2004. He was constantly reinventing himself as a writer, but remained pretty much the same person after he took home the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Born a Lithuanian, he became a U.S. citizen eventually, and dissected the intellectual attraction to communism in his masterpiece The Captive Mind.

97. George Bernard Shaw

When we speak of 'wit' in the theater we owe a debt to G. B. Shaw. In fact, his scripts are so funny there's hardly any reason to see them performed. Pygmalion's a great play, but his writing after WWI, most notably Heartbreak House, is darker and better.

96. Wallace Stevens

Anti-semite? Sure. A little old-fashioned? No doubt. Was he one of the greatest poets of the twentienth century? No question. You might say that Stevens never quite seems like himself, which is a towering accomplishment, because he never quite sounds like anyone else either. Recommended Reading: 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,' 'Anecdote of the Jar,' 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction'.

95. Rumi

We prefer to keep our religion, poetry, and booze in separate containers, but we know a lot of ex-hippie poets who swear by this guy. The Coleman Barks translations are the gold-standard. Born in modern-day Afghanistan, Rumi might as well have been a god.

94. W.G. Sebald

No writer so little acclaimed in the first part of his life lived a second one in literary style in the West. Sebald can reasonably contend to have invented much of this country's creative nonfiction, and that is simply a glint of his admirers. It is for good reason that he is taught in every graduate writing program in America: his novels of half-remembrance are brilliant interlocking art pieces; seen whole they completely explain the violence in the middle half of the 20th century. Recommended reading: The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants.

93. Robert Hayden

Hayden's reputation is sure to be burnished by time. Sure, he had influence on an entire generation of African-American poets; but it is the sustained quality of his verses that we now have to contend with. His was an intellect of constant seriousness, mapping the tragedy of his own heart. His vision of language and life, in elegy or eulogy, is among the most impressive achievements in the arts. Recommended reading: "Those Winter Sundays", "October," Selected Poems.

92. Henry Miller

It's fun to talk about Henry Miller at parties, and it took us a long time to realize that those who denounce him first made their acquaintance with Miller's least representative work, Tropic of Cancer. It's an important book, but mainly for the history of American censorship. The correct way to fall in love with Miller is through his exquisite nonfiction, most notably The Collosus of Maroussi and Big Sur and the Oranges of Heironymous Bosch.

91. Robert Heinlein

Morality without end, purpose in the unreal. He got so much better as a writer you can imagine him as one of his humble characters, toiling endlessly at something larger than himself and maybe impossible. Is there any more fun you can have than Stranger in a Strange Land? To Sail Beyond Sunset? The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress? Starship Troopers? His juveniles are in some ways even more brilliant, bringing his dream of the stars to audience poised to inherit it. Recommended reading: Farmer in the Sky, Tunnel in the Sky, Between Planets, Citizen of the Galaxy

90. Lorine Niedecker

She was a recluse from Wisconsin who loved the Imagists. She wrote to Louis Zukofsky, she kept writing in her bizarre island home. Her nature poetry is better than anyone else's nature poetry, her confessional poetry is fresher and more accessible than Plath or Sexton. She was funny, and could be so sad. She is the marvelous product of a strange and relentless world. Recommended reading: "For Paul", Collected Poems.

89. George Eliot

Born Mary Anne Evans in 1819, she wrote Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and Silas Marner, a threesome that must rank with any of the finer achievements of realism in fiction. Yet her breadth of character and theme took on so much more. This is a writer that had common sense, verve and intricate knowledge about the unfolding of human events. Eliot's ouvre is astonishingly mature for its time, and remains readable today.

88. David Mamet

The quintessentially Jewish-American dramatist, his conquests of poetry and fiction were minor. But he exploded the idea of the American play, creating an exciting new vernacular that brought crowds, excitement and controversy to the stage. Famous for shutting down an all-female production of his masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet is an able theoretician, and maybe the most important Chicago Jew of all time. Recommended reading: American Buffalo, The Duck Variations, Boston Marriage.

87. Derek Walcott

Born on the island of St. Lucia in 1930, Walcott is the most important poet of the Carribean, and an enduring voice in international letters. His epic poems, bringing classicism to new places and forms, are major, and his command of the short poem is as adept as Auden's, a man Walcott admired greatly. His "Eulogy to W.H. Auden" gets us every time. Also, Walcott's achievements in the theatrical realm are not to be overlooked. Recommended reading: Omeros, The Arkansas Testament.

86. Isak Dinesen

Denmark's greatest writer, she was born Karen Dinesen, and she would write about the strangeness of her life in Kenya with her husband. Carson McCullers arranged for her to meet Marilyn Monroe; they danced on a tabletop together. She wrote "Out of Africa" about her time with her husband in Kenya; "Babette's Feast" was her finest story. She was more delicate with her prose than her storytelling, but both are worthy of a place here in this best of all possible lists.

85. Maryse Conde

She is to the novel what Walcott is to the long poem. Her intricate templates for Carribean novels are massively impactful reimaginings of Western themes, replete with other places and attitudes that she experienced. Better than John Irving or Richard Price, her chronicling of the French attitude towards its possessions is her very autobiography. Recommended reading: I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem, Crossing the Mangrove, Segu.

84. Joyce Cary

Relentlessly funny, incredibly inventive, and one hell of a writer. His comic trilogy was the height of modernism at the time. A voice that comes from the future, born with knowledge of the past, buoyed by the good humor of the present. The much-traveled Irishman wrote the most sterling address to colonialism we ever had. But mainly, he loved being an artist, and he was one of the finest his country would ever produce. Recommended reading: The Horse's Mouth, To Be A Pilgrim, Mister Johnson.

83. Frank O'Hara

The gay American New York poet whose confessional and addictive personality made him funny and fast. He wrote some of his poems in a room with his friends; he fucked well and seriously; he redefined the modern by looking in the mirror. Sure he has a few misfires, but he's so fearless, never afraid to take chances, to say something more revealing of himself than is absolutely necessary. Recommended reading: "A Step Away From Them", "Autobiographia Literaria", the new Selected Poems.

82. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

His story A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings is a great relief to high school kids everywhere, its magic remedy to the stale fare of English authors overstuffing their textbooks. Not sure what his master fiction 100 Years of Solitude is meant to remedy, but every college kid from Los Angeles to Prague has a copy. Amazingly he is still alive, although he does not write anymore. He said his piece. Recommended reading: The Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor, An Evil Hour, The Autumn of the Patriarch.

81. Ernest Hemingway

He was a talented novelist and short-story writer who was larger than life. Like his less talented peer F. Scott Fitzgerald, his writing can occassionally seem dated and stale, but there is no denying his influence, and his finer work ranks with the supreme achievements of American fiction. "Hills Like White Elephants" is great the first time you read it, but only the first time. This remains true of much of his works. We find it strange to think he was made of flesh and bone, and not smelted parts of several decrepit Civil War era bronze statues. Recommended reading: A Moveable Feast, A Farewell to Arms.

80. Carson McCullers

Her masterpiece The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was an immediate literary sensation. Rarely is an important work so quickly recognized as such. She wrote in a distinctly American idiom but her characters and themes were flawless and important. After World War II, she lived mostly in Paris. The Member of the Wedding is a slip of genius, a novel in which we can believe.

79. Flann O'Brien

The Irish novel was never the same after this man conquered it. Between At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman, O'Brien wrote the road map for experimental fiction, pulling the language apart before putting it back together again. Born Brian O'Nolan, he married a typist. He is the mad master, and his influence and import reigns supreme today, where his novels are still among the funniest, most inventive things ever to appear in English. Recommended reading: Flann O'Brien At War: Myles na gCopaleen 1940-1945.

78. Julio Cortazar

Half-Belgian, half-Argentinian, he was the modern master of the experimental novel. Hopscotch is the most infuriating, the funniest, most inventive. His parents split up, he dropped out of school. He later died of leukemia. His titantic efforts in the short story genre have little competition in any era of history. Cortazar gives the lie to the idea that there are many different literatures by making one of them all.

77. Saul Bellow

The greatest novel of the 1950s begins, "I am an American, Chicago-born." The Adventures of Augie March makes The Catcher in the Rye look like a fucking children's book. He followed it up with a lively collection of novels that rank with the modern masters. A little less success might have challenged him better, but as it is, he's the greatest Jewish novelist of the 20th century, and that ain't bad.

76. Jonathan Swift

He survives among his satirist peers for distinctiveness of vision and the impact of his classic essay A Modest Proposal, and the wonderfully still-readable Gulliver's Travels, which basically foretold all of modernity better than anyone else ever would or could.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. You can visit the This Recording tumblr here. Tune in tomorrow for the next 25 in our list.

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