Writers — Literary Influence

The Iliad and the Odyssey stand at the head of Western literature; every epic after him measures itself against these poems.

• → Influenced: Virgil
• → Admired: Dante Alighieri
• → Influenced: John Milton
• → Influenced: James Joyce

Rome's national poet, whose Aeneid reworked Homer's epics into a myth of empire and destiny.

• ← Influenced: Homer
• → Influenced: Dante Alighieri
• → Influenced: John Milton

His Divine Comedy, guided by Virgil himself, made the Tuscan vernacular a language fit for the highest poetry.

• ← Influenced: Virgil
• ← Admired: Homer
• → Influenced: Petrarch
• → Influenced: John Milton

Father of humanism, whose sonnets to Laura set the template for love poetry across Renaissance Europe.

• ← Influenced: Dante Alighieri
• → Influenced: William Shakespeare

The supreme dramatist of the English language, whose portraits of inwardness remade what character in literature could be.

• ← Influenced: Petrarch
• → Influenced: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• → Admired: Fyodor Dostoevsky
• → Influenced: James Joyce

Don Quixote is often called the first modern novel — a book that laughs at its own genre and invents self-aware fiction.

• → Influenced: Charles Dickens
• → Influenced: Gustave Flaubert
• → Influenced: Jorge Luis Borges

Paradise Lost carried the classical epic into English and Protestant England, its grand style shaping poetry for two centuries.

• ← Influenced: Homer
• ← Influenced: Virgil
• ← Influenced: Dante Alighieri
• → Influenced: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Germany's towering man of letters, whose Faust and Werther bridged Enlightenment reason and Romantic feeling.

• ← Influenced: William Shakespeare
• ← Influenced: John Milton
• → Influenced: Leo Tolstoy

Her comedies of manners perfected free indirect style and the psychology of ordinary social life.

• → Influenced: Charles Dickens

The great chronicler of Victorian society, whose vivid characters and social conscience defined the popular novel.

• ← Influenced: Miguel de Cervantes
• ← Influenced: Jane Austen
• → Influenced: Fyodor Dostoevsky
• → Influenced: Franz Kafka

With Madame Bovary he raised prose to the exactness of poetry — the patron saint of the well-made sentence.

• ← Influenced: Miguel de Cervantes
• → Influenced: James Joyce
• → Influenced: Marcel Proust
• → Admired: Franz Kafka

His novels of guilt, freedom, and faith read as philosophy in fiction, mapping the depths of the divided self.

• ← Admired: William Shakespeare
• ← Influenced: Charles Dickens
• → Influenced: Franz Kafka
• → Admired: Virginia Woolf

War and Peace and Anna Karenina brought realist fiction to its widest scope and its deepest moral seriousness.

• ← Influenced: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• → Influenced: Virginia Woolf
• → Admired: James Joyce

His parables of bureaucracy and alienation gave the twentieth century a whole adjective — Kafkaesque.

• ← Influenced: Charles Dickens
• ← Influenced: Fyodor Dostoevsky
• → Influenced: Jorge Luis Borges
• ← Admired: Gustave Flaubert

In Search of Lost Time turned memory and consciousness into the substance of the novel itself.

• ← Influenced: Gustave Flaubert
• → Influenced: Virginia Woolf

Ulysses pushed stream of consciousness to its limit, reworking Homer's Odyssey into a single Dublin day.

• ← Influenced: Gustave Flaubert
• ← Admired: Leo Tolstoy
• ← Influenced: Homer
• → Influenced: Virginia Woolf
• ← Influenced: William Shakespeare

She dissolved plot into the flow of perception, making the inner life of ordinary moments her subject.

• ← Admired: Fyodor Dostoevsky
• ← Influenced: Leo Tolstoy
• ← Influenced: Marcel Proust
• ← Influenced: James Joyce

His labyrinthine short fictions of mirrors, libraries, and infinity reshaped the imagination of world literature.

• ← Influenced: Miguel de Cervantes
• ← Influenced: Franz Kafka