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Les Misérables made poverty a moral emergency for a continent.

His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.

Leaves of Grass invented American poetic voice.

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.

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

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

First woman to win the literature Nobel.

Doctor-playwright who invented modern drama's subtext.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.

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

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.