The Literary 100

Beyond the fact that you completed the prose portion of the final today, the Scholar Quiz team is now in possession of Daniel S. Burt's The Literary 100, which ranks writers of poetry, plays, novels, and the like.

I thought I would share the highlights, and you could debate how true this list is from your own reading ethos.

1. Shakespeare     2. Dante       3. Homer      4. Tolstoy      5. Chaucer     6. Dickens       7. Joyce      
8. Milton      9. Virgil      10. Goethe       11. Cervantes       12. Shikibu      13. Sophocles    
14. Faulkner      15. Dostoevsky      16. T.S. Eliot     17. Proust      18. Austen      19. George Eliot
20. Yeats      21. Pushkin      22. Euripides      23. John Donne       24. Melville                                
25. Keats (seriously, 25!)       26. Ovid       27. Tu Fu      28. Blake       29. Aeschylus      30. Flaubert
31. Kafka       32. Moliere       33. Wordsworth       34. Aristophanes       35. Mann       36. Ibsen
37. Chekhov      38. Henry James      39. Nabokov      40. Whitman       41. Balzac       42. Swift
43. Stendhal       44. Hardy        45. Shaw     46. Hemingway      47. D.H. Lawrence      48. Baudelaire 49. Beckett      50. Woolf      51. Pope      52. Rabelais     53. Petrarch       54. Dickinson      55. Poe 56. Fielding      57. Conrad      58. Robert Browning      59. Camus      60. Charlotte Bronte
61. Emily Bronte (what is with the lack of Bronte love?)      62. Racine       63. Twain    
64. Strindberg      65. Zola      66. Borges      67. Xueqin      68. Boccaccio       69. Voltaire    
70. Sterne      71. Thackeray      72. Percy Shelley (uh, where is Mary on this list?)     73. O'Neill
74. Stevens      75. Byron       76. Garcia Marquez       77. Walter Scott      78. Neruda
79. Musil      80. Tennyson      81. Flannery O'Connor      82. Catullus       83. Garcia Lorca
84. Hawthorne       85. Dreiser       86. Ellison       87. Trollope      88. Fitzgerald      89. Hugo        
90. Tagore      91. Defoe      92. Gunter Grass       93. Xun       94. Forster       95. Bashevis Singer
96. Jun'ichiro      97. Wright       98. Stein        99. Motokiyo       100. Oscar Wilde

You're welcome to send me an e-mail with your thoughts on this list, or just wait to share during our after school AP Lit sessions on Monday and Tuesday. As mentioned - several instances I recall - in class, these after school cram sessions are that last chance to practice the skills and review terminology for the AP exam next week. It would behoove you to come to both of these sessions. We will start with multiple choice, move into poetry prompt and writing, look at prose prompt necessities, figure out what texts to use for free response, and work with poetry and AP Lit cards. This will be the cycle for review. Our super cram on Monday will go as many cycles as needed. I have so many prompts on hand for you.