Under $20 Rulers of Literature

These rulers celebrate great writing. It is heavily skewed toward Western authors, but we have made a few notable exceptions. The first writer is someone whose name we don’t know, but they wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian around 4000 years ago. Confucius (551-479 BC) lived and wrote in China.

Many styles of writing are represented here, from epic poetry to fiction and from plays to autobiographies. While in our list we give a lot of attention to English-language writers, there are also authors on this ruler who wrote in Sumerian, Greek, Chinese, Latin, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Norwegian, and Russian. The dates listed on this ruler are the years of each individual’s birth and death, if known.

Six of the writers on our list are women: Murasaki Shikibu (c.978), Jane Austen (1775-1817), the sisters Charlotte (1816-1855) and Emily (1818-1848) Brontë, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), and Toni Morrison (1931-2019).

A recent update to this ruler has seen us add Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), whose novel Things Fall Apart is the most widely read book in modern African literature.