Novelist · 1547 – 1616
Miguel de Cervantes
If you're interested in Miguel de Cervantes, these historical figures share a similar impact, discipline, philosophy, or era. Each recommendation explains why the connection exists.
Similar Impact & Significance
William Shakespeare
96William Shakespeare was an English playwright and poet widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist.
Why His exact contemporary in another language; both died in 1616 and tower over their national literatures.
Dante Alighieri
93Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet of the late Middle Ages whose masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is considered one of the greatest works of world literature and helped establish the Italian language.
Why An earlier giant of European literature who likewise elevated his vernacular to supreme art.
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
92Leo Tolstoy was a Russian novelist and moral philosopher whose epics War and Peace and Anna Karenina rank among the greatest works of fiction, and whose later doctrine of nonviolence influenced Gandhi and King.
Why A later master of the novel, the form Cervantes is credited with inventing.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
91Fyodor Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist whose psychologically penetrating works, including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, probe faith, guilt, and freedom and helped shape modern existential thought.
Why Admired Don Quixote profoundly, calling it among the greatest works ever written.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
92Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, poet, and statesman, widely regarded as the greatest figure in German literature and one of the towering minds of European culture.
Why Also a writer & poet · Comparable historical impact
Alexandre Dumas
81Alexandre Dumas was a French writer whose swashbuckling historical novels — The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo — became some of the most popular and widely adapted stories in the world.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
James Joyce
82James Joyce was an Irish novelist whose experimental masterpiece Ulysses is widely regarded as the greatest novel of the 20th century, and whose innovations in language and stream of consciousness transformed modern literature.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Victor Marie Hugo
89Victor Hugo was a French novelist, poet, and dramatist, the towering figure of French Romanticism, whose novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame are monuments of world literature.
Why Also a novelist & poet · Comparable historical impact
Agatha Christie
81Agatha Christie was an English writer, the best-selling novelist of all time, whose ingenious detective stories featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple made her the undisputed "Queen of Crime".
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Alexander Pushkin
81Alexander Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright and novelist, regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature, whose verse novel Eugene Onegin and other works shaped the language and the writers who followed him.
Why Also a poet & novelist · Comparable historical impact
Oscar Wilde
81Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and wit, one of the most celebrated playwrights of late-Victorian London, whose sparkling comedies, the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and famous epigrams made him a legend — before a scandalous trial destroyed his career.
Why Also a playwright & writer · Comparable historical impact
Charles Dickens
86Charles Dickens was an English novelist of the Victorian age, the most popular writer of his time and one of the greatest in the English language, whose vivid characters and social conscience defined the 19th-century novel.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Ernest Hemingway
82Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer whose spare, understated prose style revolutionized 20th-century fiction, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for works such as The Old Man and the Sea.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Jane Austen
88Jane Austen was an English novelist whose witty, incisive novels of manners, including Pride and Prejudice and Emma, are masterpieces of English literature and remain enduringly popular.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Marcel Proust
81Marcel Proust was a French novelist whose monumental seven-volume In Search of Lost Time is one of the most celebrated novels of the 20th century, transforming fiction with its exploration of memory, time and consciousness.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Mark Twain
84Mark Twain was an American writer and humorist, called the "father of American literature", whose novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn captured the voice of America and remain classics of world literature.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Toni Morrison
81Toni Morrison was an American novelist whose richly poetic explorations of Black American life — above all Beloved — won her the Pulitzer Prize and made her the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Anton Chekhov
81Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer — and a practising physician — widely regarded as among the greatest masters of both the short story and modern drama, whose plays like The Cherry Orchard transformed the theatre.
Why Also a playwright & writer · Comparable historical impact
Arthur Conan Doyle
81Arthur Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician who created Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective in fiction, whose stories of brilliant deduction defined the detective genre and remain among the best-loved in the world.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Same Field or Discipline
Herman Melville
80Herman Melville was an American novelist and poet whose Moby-Dick, neglected in his lifetime, is now regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written and a towering achievement of American literature.
Why Also a novelist & writer
Murasaki Shikibu
80Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese noblewoman and writer of the Heian court whose Tale of Genji, written around 1010, is often called the world's first novel and a masterpiece of world literature.
Why Also a novelist & writer
Robert Louis Stevenson
79Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish writer whose adventure and Gothic tales — Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped — became enduring classics read around the world.
Why Also a novelist & writer
Rudyard Kipling
79Rudyard Kipling was a British writer and poet, author of The Jungle Book and the poem "If—", who became the first English-language winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, though his association with British imperialism has made his legacy contested.
Why Also a writer & poet
William Butler Yeats
80William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and a driving force of the Irish Literary Revival, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and helped found Ireland's national theatre.
Why Also a poet & playwright