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Top 100 Most Famous Authors and Writers

Friday, July 17, 2026

A past Centumth puzzle. Play it on this page with five guesses, or read the full Top 100 ranking below.

From classic novelists to modern storytellers, guess the most famous and widely read authors who penned the world's greatest books, plays, and poems.

This list was researched and ranked by hand for Centumth. Entries near #1 are the names almost everyone thinks of first. Entries near #100 are true, a little obscure, and still fair if you think sideways. Sources below are the starting point — the final order can include small editorial calls so the daily puzzle stays balanced.

You can play this archive puzzle with five guesses, or reveal the complete ranking if you came here looking for the list. Revealing locks this puzzle — you won’t be able to play it afterward.

Sources

Outbound sources help you verify the ranking. The published order is Centumth’s.

The full Top 100

  1. #1William Shakespeare
  2. #2Stephen King
  3. #3J.K. Rowling
  4. #4Charles Dickens
  5. #5Mark Twain
  6. #6Jane Austen
  7. #7Edgar Allan Poe
  8. #8J.R.R. Tolkien
  9. #9George R.R. Martin
  10. #10Dr. Seuss
  11. #11Agatha Christie
  12. #12Roald Dahl
  13. #13Ernest Hemingway
  14. #14F. Scott Fitzgerald
  15. #15George Orwell
  16. #16C.S. Lewis
  17. #17Arthur Conan Doyle
  18. #18Homer
  19. #19Leo Tolstoy
  20. #20Fyodor Dostoevsky
  21. #21Victor Hugo
  22. #22Mary Shelley
  23. #23Bram Stoker
  24. #24Oscar Wilde
  25. #25H.G. Wells
  26. #26Jules Verne
  27. #27John Steinbeck
  28. #28Harper Lee
  29. #29J.D. Salinger
  30. #30Suzanne Collins
  31. #31Stephenie Meyer
  32. #32Rick Riordan
  33. #33John Grisham
  34. #34James Patterson
  35. #35Dan Brown
  36. #36Danielle Steel
  37. #37Nicholas Sparks
  38. #38Neil Gaiman
  39. #39John Green
  40. #40Margaret Atwood
  41. #41Terry Pratchett
  42. #42Toni Morrison
  43. #43Maya Angelou
  44. #44Alice Walker
  45. #45Ray Bradbury
  46. #46Isaac Asimov
  47. #47Arthur C. Clarke
  48. #48Frank Herbert
  49. #49Philip K. Dick
  50. #50H.P. Lovecraft
  51. #51Douglas Adams
  52. #52Robert Jordan
  53. #53Anne Rice
  54. #54Lewis Carroll
  55. #55L. Frank Baum
  56. #56J.M. Barrie
  57. #57A.A. Milne
  58. #58Hans Christian Andersen
  59. #59Brothers Grimm
  60. #60Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  61. #61Emily Dickinson
  62. #62Walt Whitman
  63. #63Robert Frost
  64. #64Sylvia Plath
  65. #65Langston Hughes
  66. #66T.S. Eliot
  67. #67R.L. Stine
  68. #68Beatrix Potter
  69. #69Charlotte Brontë
  70. #70Emily Brontë
  71. #71Virginia Woolf
  72. #72Gabriel García Márquez
  73. #73Paulo Coelho
  74. #74Miguel de Cervantes
  75. #75Vladimir Nabokov
  76. #76Kurt Vonnegut
  77. #77Ayn Rand
  78. #78Aldous Huxley
  79. #79Jack London
  80. #80Herman Melville
  81. #81Louisa May Alcott
  82. #82Ralph Waldo Emerson
  83. #83Henry David Thoreau
  84. #84Nathaniel Hawthorne
  85. #85Joseph Heller
  86. #86Truman Capote
  87. #87Tom Clancy
  88. #88E.B. White
  89. #89Maurice Sendak
  90. #90Shel Silverstein
  91. #91Judy Blume
  92. #92Beverly Cleary
  93. #93Nora Roberts
  94. #94Michael Crichton
  95. #95Ian Fleming
  96. #96Stan Lee
  97. #97Enid Blyton
  98. #98Eric Carle
  99. #99Margaret Mitchell
  100. #100Gillian Flynn

The full ranked list is included on this page. Use Reveal full 100 list to read it, or play the game above.