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Les Misérables made poverty a moral emergency for a continent.

Clockmaker turned mental healer whose notebooks seeded the entire New Thought movement.

Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.

First existentialist; wrote on anxiety, despair and the leap of faith.

Swedenborgian minister who wrote the first systematic books of mental-cure philosophy.

His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.

Das Kapital made class, capital and crisis the permanent grammar of economic argument.

Leaves of Grass invented American poetic voice.

The Condition of the Working Class in England founded empirical labour economics.

Took the reader inside the mind that has decided to do the terrible thing.

War and Peace; his nonviolence doctrine directly shaped Gandhi.

A Doll's House detonated 19th-century assumptions about marriage.

1,800 poems found in a drawer redefined lyric compression.

Essayist who popularised 'thoughts are things' and the idea of mental forces.

Wrote a novel narrated by a dead man in 1881; Brazil's greatest writer.

Founded American psychology and, with Peirce, pragmatism; studied New Thought as 'mind-cure'.

Genealogy of morals, the will to power and the revaluation of all values.

Her recovery from tuberculosis through affirmative prayer began the Unity movement.

Indian-service judge whose Edinburgh Lectures gave New Thought a systematic metaphysics.

Won the world's first national women's vote in 1893.

The 'teacher of teachers' who trained the founders of Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science.

Poet-revolutionary whose essays founded Cuban and pan-American thought.

Co-founded Unity with Myrtle Fillmore in 1889; built its prayer ministry and publishing house.

Invented psychoanalysis and the modern language of the unconscious.

First woman to win the literature Nobel.

Pragmatist whose learning-by-doing reshaped schools on every continent.

Doctor-playwright who invented modern drama's subtext.

The Science of Getting Rich turned New Thought toward prosperity and later inspired The Secret.

First non-European Nobel laureate; wrote two nations' anthems.

Ophthalmologist whose novels ignited the Philippine revolution; executed at 35.

Founded anthroposophic medicine with Ita Wegman; still practised in European hospitals.

Co-founded Divine Science and its Denver college of practitioners.

Prolific author who named the law of attraction and wrote as Yogi Ramacharaka.

Linked bureaucracy, religion and capitalism; founded the sociology of organisations.

Wrote As a Man Thinketh, the movement's most reprinted book.

The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.

Turned nonviolent resistance into a working political technology.

Illustrator turned teacher whose parables made affirmation practice everyday.

Poet-philosopher who conceived the idea of Pakistan.

Founded modern Chinese literature and diagnosed a nation in vernacular prose.

Stream of consciousness and A Room of One's Own.

Ulysses reorganised what a novel could attempt.

Kristin Lavransdatter; medieval Norway rendered with modern psychology.

Gave bureaucratic dread an adjective in every major language.

Think and Grow Rich carried New Thought into business self-help; his sourcing remains disputed.

The Great Transformation showed markets are made by states, not found in nature.

Filled New York auditoriums in the Depression; his writing shaped early Alcoholics Anonymous.

Founded Religious Science and wrote The Science of Mind, its systematic textbook.

Rebuilt Hebrew as a modern literary language.

Wrote as dozens of invented authors; The Book of Disquiet.

Requiem memorised by friends because writing it down was fatal.

First Latin American to win the literature Nobel; teacher and diplomat.

Twice redirected philosophy — first with logical form, then with language as use.

Wrote Vietnam's declaration of independence quoting Jefferson.

Principal architect of India's constitution and Dalit emancipation.

Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.

Poet and dramatist murdered by fascists; Spain's enduring wound.

The Power of Positive Thinking sold tens of millions and mainstreamed the movement.

Recast affirmation as subconscious programming for a postwar readership.

First Japanese literature laureate; Snow Country and The Old Capital.

Stripped English prose to the bone.

Invented the labyrinth-library imagination that prefigured hypertext.

El Señor Presidente invented the Latin American dictator novel.