Who wrote these famous books?

These are the most well-known books with a single definite or likely author – the ones with over 50 Wikipedia languages (by Sep 2022), in descending order. Can you name the people who wrote them? Every writer only appears once!

Books of the bible and fairy tales without clear author not counted

Some of these are not strictly books, but texts that were later published in book form

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Last updated: December 20, 2022

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First submitted	September 28, 2022
Times taken	1,782
Average score	47.9%
Rating	4.67
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Book	language	year	Author
Iliad	Old Greek	-700	Homer
Don Quixote	Spanish	1615	Miguel de Cervantes
Book of Mormon	English	1830	Joseph Smith
The Little Prince	French	1943	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Lord of the Rings	English	1955	J. R. R. Tolkien
The Communist Manifesto	German	1848	Karl Marx
Divine Comedy	Italian	1320	Dante Alighieri
Shahnameh	Persian	1010	Ferdowsi
Romeo and Juliet	English	1597	William Shakespeare
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland	English	1862	Lewis Carroll
Dream of the Red Chamber	Chinese	1759	Cao Xueqin
The Art of War	Old Chinese	-500	Sun Tzu
The Tale of Genji	Japanese	1010	Murasaki Shikibu
Aeneid	Latin	-19	Virgil
Nineteen Eighty-Four	English	1948	George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone	English	1997	J. K. Rowling
Robinson Crusoe	English	1719	Daniel Defoe
Mein Kampf	German	1925	Adolf Hitler
Charlotte's Web	English	1954	E. B. White
Kama Sutra	Sanskrit	250	Vatsyayana Mallanaga
War and Peace	Russian	1869	Leo Tolstoy
Republic	Old Greek	-375	Plato
Crime and Punishment	Russian	1869	Fyodor Dostoevsky
One Hundred Years of Solitude	Spanish	1967	Gabriel Garcia Márquez
On the Origin of Species	English	1859	Charles Darwin
Kalevala	Finnish	1835	Elias Lönnrot
The Old Man and the Sea	English	1958	Ernest Hemingway
The Prince	Italian	1513	Niccolò Machiavelli
Ulysses	English	1922	James Joyce
Tao Te Ching	Old Chinese	-400	Laozi
The Da Vinci Code	English	2003	Dan Brown
Frankenstein	English	1818	Mary Shelley
Oliver Twist	English	1839	Charles Dickens
The Diary of a Young Girl	Dutch	1947	Anne Frank
Dracula	English	1897	Bram Stoker
The Three Musketeers	French	1844	Alexandre Dumas
Pride and Prejudice	English	1813	Jane Austen
Principia Mathematica	Latin	1680	Isaac Newton
Elements	Old Greek	-300	Euclid
The Adventures of Pinocchio	Italien	1881	Carlo Collodi
The Alchemist	Portuguese	1988	Paulo Coelho
Les Misérables	French	1862	Victor Hugo
Moby-Dick	English	1851	Herman Melville
Gulliver's Travels	English	1726	Jonathan Swift
The Catcher in the Rye	English	1951	J. D. Salinger
The Decameron	Italian	1348	Giovanni Boccaccio
The Great Gatsby	English	1925	F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Stranger	French	1942	Albert Camus
Lolita	English	1954	Vladimir Nabokov
The Little Mermaid	Danish	1837	Hans Christian Andersen
The Jungle Book	English	1894	Rudyard Kipling
The Metamorphosis	German	1912	Franz Kafka
Metamorphoses	Latin	8	Ovid
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas	French	1870	Jules Verne
Waiting for Godot	English	1949	Samuel Beckett
Journey to the West	Chinese	1592	Wu Cheng'en
Thus Spoke Zarathustra	German	1883	Friedrich Nietzsche
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	English	1876	Mark Twain
Paradise Lost	English	1667	John Milton
Wuthering Heights	English	1847	Emily Brontë
The Master and Margarita	Russian	1967	Mikhail Bulgakov
Jane Eyre	English	1847	Charlotte Brontë
Madame Bovary	French	1856	Gustave Flaubert
The Picture of Dorian Gray	English	1890	Oscar Wilde
The Canterbury Tales	English	1387	Geoffrey Chaucer
Romance of the Three Kingdoms	Old Chinese	1522	Luo Guanzhong
Panchatantra	Sanskrit	-200	Vishnu Sharma
Almagest	Old Greek	150	Claudius Ptolemy
Theogony	Old Greek	-700	Hesiod
Eugene Onegin	Russian	1833	Alexander Pushkin
A Game of Thrones	English	1996	George R. R. Martin
The Wealth of Nations	English	1776	Adam Smith
The Name of the Rose	Italian	1980	Umberto Eco
Uncle Tom's Cabin	English	1852	Harriet Beecher Stowe
Faust	German	1831	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To Kill a Mockingbird	English	1960	Harper Lee
The Wizard of Oz	English	1900	Frank L. Baum
The Hound of the Baskervilles	English	1902	Arthur Conan Doyle
Twilight	English	2005	Stephenie Mayer
Commentarii de Bello Gallico	Latin	-49	Julius Caesar
Sahih _-_____	Arabic	846	Muhammad al-Bukhari
Life Is a Dream	Spanish	1635	Pedro Calderón de la Barca
The Grapes of Wrath	English	1939	John Steinbeck
Antigone	Old Greek	-441	Sophocles
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe	English	1950	C. S. Lewis
____'s Anatomy	English	1858	Henry Gray
Kojiki	Old Chinese	712	Ō no Yasumaro
The War of the Worlds	English	1897	H. G. Wells
Fahrenheit 451	English	1953	Ray Bradbury
Clash of Civilizations	English	1996	Samuel P. Huntington
Brave New World	English	1932	Aldous Huxley
Dune	English	1965	Frank Herbert
Gone with the Wind	English	1936	Margaret Mitchell
Treasure Island	English	1883	Robert Louis Stevenson

Level 95

Sep 28, 2022

Very good quiz. One typo: it's Nabokov, not Nabukov, for Lolita.

Level 71

Sep 29, 2022

Thanks! Fixed.

Level 66

Sep 29, 2022

Not fixed yet. Caught me.

Level 71

Sep 29, 2022

Sorry, forgot to resubmit

Level 94

Oct 7, 2022

I really appreciated the criteria to select the books.

Of course the final list results in "occidental" literature to be over represented, but at least it is based on an objective criteria, not just "the best books" (according to my mother-in-law because she says so).

Level 71

Oct 7, 2022

I agree, that's why I created this quiz in the first place. Objective criteria are the only way to take such a list seriously, and I think even a well-read literary scholar's list would reflect their personal preferences.

English books have an extremely outsized impact because they can be read all over the world in their original language, which diminishes diversity but probably isn't a problem for the quiz because this size is in English too.

If you like the concept, you can check out some of my other recent quizzes, they are compiled with the same method (and I'm in the process of creating more).

Level 69

Oct 7, 2022

I love such quizzes, especially when they focus on so many literatures outside the English-speaking countries. I'm proud to have read most of these books, including the ones from the Far East.

Thank you! Nominated!

There are two spelling mistakes, though: Dorian Gray and Daniel Defoe have swapped one letter in their names. One of them is misspelt as "Grey" and the other as "Dafoe".

Level 71

Oct 7, 2022

Wow, impressive! Thanks for the corrections and the kind words.

Level 91

Oct 7, 2022

Nice quiz. Nominated. One question: Should Friedrich Engels, as co-author, be an acceptable answer for "The Communist Manifesto"?

Level 71

Oct 7, 2022

Yes, he should. But now that I think about it, at 23 pages you can't really call it a book. I might remove it altogether.

Level 85

Oct 19, 2022

Does anyone who know Engels wrote it not know that Marx also wrote it?

Level 76

Dec 27, 2022

Really enjoyed this! In terms of getting out of Western books, I think Omar Khayyam's Rubayyat might be an example of a book that's quite well known worldwide.

The Mahabharata and Ramayana are super famous but I wouldn't have known their authors without looking them up. Maybe something like Maimonides' Mishne Torah, or maybe ibn Battuta's Rihla?

Just brainstorming, quiz is great as-is! Still mad at myself for forgetting Virgil went through so many Latin poets

Level 71

Dec 27, 2022

Glad you liked it! The quiz criteria are objective rather than subjective, so I can't change the included books, only the cutoff.

Level 74

Dec 27, 2022

Nominated but it's bit heavy for a featured quiz. Maybe you could edit it a little bit?

Level 71

Dec 27, 2022

Thanks! What do you mean by "heavy", do you think it's too long? The criteria are objective, so I can't choose the included books.

Level 75

Dec 27, 2022

Loved this. I was going to suggest accepting the spelling my copy of the Shahnameh uses, except that it turns out I was the one misspelling Ferdowsi. Engels deserves co-billing for the Manifesto.

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