I decided I better start combining the Top Author lists I've been working off of and make a serious Top 100 Authors List. So, I spent most of today doing that! I have 5 different top 100 lists I've been working from, so quite a variety. I made a spreadsheet today and listed all the authors and their ranking on each of the lists. If authors were on all five lists, then I averaged their rankings on those lists and came up with a number, and put them at the top. Then, I did the same for authors on 4 out of the 5 lists, then 3 out of the 5, then 2 out of the 5, then, finally, authors who were just on one list. Finally, the 100 mark came while I was doing the 1's.

Many authors were left off the top 100! I was surprised. Even some I've read recently didn't make the cut. Authors like...Rudyward Kipling, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Mitchell, Edith Wharton, and some more contemporary authors, Dan Brown, Ken Follet, Frank McCourt and Larry McMurtry. However, my goal has become more than to just read at least one book from each of the Top 100 Authors, because there are so many good books! I've also been making lists of the top novels, and taking serious recommendations from others...so my list of books to read is far more than just 100.

Anyway....below is the final list after combining the five lists. Shakespeare came out on top with a score of 2.2! Only 17 authors made all five lists. And, the authors who made at least 3 of the lists made the top 50 perfectly. So...everything after the top 50 were either on one or two lists. P.S. I don't know why my list is so out of kilter, but I'm not retyping all those names!

1	Shakespeare, William
2	Dostoevsky, Fyodor
3	Dickens, Charles
4	Alighieri, Dante
5	Tolstoy, Leo
6	Faulkner, William
7	Kafka, Franz
8	Proust, Marcel
9	Cervantes, Miguel
10	Chekhov, Anton
11	Melville, Herman
12	Twain, Mark
13	Hemingway, Ernest
14	Woolf, Virginia
15	Poe, Edgar Allan
16	Marquez, Gabriel G.
17	Joyce, James
18	Orwell, George
19	Homer
20	Austen, Jane
21	Nabokov, Vladimir
22	Steinbeck, John
23	Goethe, Johann
24	Camus, Albert
25	Hugo, Victor
26	Bronte, Charlotte
27	Eliot, George
28	Wilde, Oscar
29	Conrad, Joseph
30	de Balzac, Honore
31	Blake, William
32	Tolkien, J.R.R.
33	Milton, John
34	Chaucer
35	Dumas, Alexander
36	Sophocles
37	Hardy, Thomas
38	Doyle, Arther Conan
39	Keats, John
40	Salinger, J.D.
41	Eliot, T.S.
42	Fitzgerald, F. Scott
43	Beckett, Samuel
44	Bronte, Emily
45	Stevenson, Robert L.
46	Flaubert, Gustave
47	Verne, Jules
48	Dickinson, Emily
49	Shaw, George B.
50	Hawthorne, Nathanial
51	Pushkin, Alexander
52	Yeats, William B.
53	Euripides
54	Virgil
55	Rowling, J.K.
56	Lee, Harper
57	Christie, Agatha
58	Adams, Douglas
59	Ovid
60	Lewis, C.S.
61	King, Stephen
62	Molaire
63	Vonnegut, Kurt
64	London, Jack
65	Byron, Lord
66	Woodsworth, William
67	Rand, Ayn
68	Maugham, W. S.
69	James, Henry
70	Turgenev, Ivan
71	Bradbury, Ray
72	Whitman, Walt
73	Heller, Joseph
74	Picoult, Jodi
75	Ibsen, Henrik
76	Swift, Jonathan
77	Huxley, Aldous
78	Morrison, Toni
79	Miller, Henry
80	Pynchon, Thomas
81	Palahiuk, Chuck
82	Ashberry, John
83	Donne, John
84	Aeschylus
85	Coleridge, Samuel
86	Kerouac, Jack
87	Murdoch, Iris
88	Dahl, Roald
89	Pullman, Philip
90	O'Neill, Eugene
91	Wells, H.G.
92	Pope, Alexander
93	Williams, Tennesse
94	Seuss, Dr.
95	Hosseini, Khalid
96	Auden, W.H.
97	Grisham, John
98	Baldwin, James
99	Irving, John
100	Berryman, John