You may be surprised that many people cannot list the names of even a few authors whose thoughts and writing have formed our history and culture. Schools no longer believe in “great men” or “great women”—at least, they telegraph this when their students can barely name philosophers beyond Aristotle or Walt Disney. To know the ideas that have shaped the world is to be shaped by them yourself; and, possibly, as T.S. Eliot posits, begin to engage with them to expand and create entirely new shapes.

This is not a definitive or exhaustive list, merely some points of reference, some well-known authors within general time periods. These time spans and even some authorships are disputed among scholars, but doesn’t propose to perfectly buttonhole every author and era. The idea is for you to know what to read if you are trying to get a grasp on great thoughts that have shaken history.

The Ancients (before 400 A.D.)

• The Bible, Old and New Testaments
• The Qur’an
• Homer (7th or 8th centuries B.C.)
• Thucydides (460-395 B.C.)
• Aristophanes (446-388 B.C.)
• Plato (427-347 B.C.)
• Aristotle (384-322 B.C)
• Virgil (70-19 B.C.)

Middle Ages (400s to early 1400s)

• Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.)
• Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.)
• Alighieri Dante (1265-1321 A.D.)
• Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400 A.D.)

Renaissance(1400s to 1600s)

• Desiderius Erasmus (1466/1469-1536 A.D.>
• Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527 A.D.)
• Martin Luther (1483-1546 A.D.)
• John Calvin (1509-1564 A.D.)
• Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616 A.D.)
• Edmund Spenser (1552-1599 A.D.)
• William Shakespeare (1547-1616 A.D.)
• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679 A.D.)
• Rene Descartes (1596-1650 A.D.)
• John Milton (1608-1674 A.D.)
• John Bunyan (1628-1688 A.D.)

Enlightenment (1600s to late 1700s)

• John Locke (1632-1704 A.D.)
• Daniel Defoe (1661?-1731 A.D.)
• Cotton Mather (1663-1728 A.D.)
• Jonathan Swift (1667-1745 A.D.)
• Alexander Pope (1688-1744 A.D.)
• Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758 A.D.)
• Jean Jacques-Rousseau (1712-1788 A.D.)
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804 A.D.)
• James Madison (1731-1856 A.D.)
• Thomas Paine (1737-1809 A.D.)
• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826 A.D.)

Romanticism and Gothicism (late 1700s to mid-1800s)

• J.W. von Goethe (1749-1832 A.D.)
• Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832 A.D.)
• Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818 A.D.)
• Jane Austen (1775-1817 A.D.)
• Washington Irving (1783-1885 A.D.)
• Lord George Byron (1788-1824)
• James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851 A.D.)
• Mary Shelley (1797-1851 A.D.)
• Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870 A.D.)
• Victor Hugo (1802-1885 A.D.)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882 A.D.)
• Nathanael Hawthorne (1804-1864 A.D.)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861 A.D.)
• Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849 A.D.)
• Robert Browning (1812-1889 A.D.)
• Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855 A.D.)
• Emily Bronte (1818-1848 A.D.)

Early Modern (mid-1800s to early 1900s)

• Charles Darwin (1809-1882 A.D.)
• Charles Dickens (1812-1870 A.D.)
• Karl Marx (1818-1883 A.D.)
• Fydor Dostoevsky (1821-1881 A.D.)
• Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910 A.D.)
• Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888 A.D.)
• Mark Twain, a.k.a. Samuel Clemens (1835-1910 A.D.)
• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900 A.D.)
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930 A.D.)
• Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936 A.D.)
• Willa Cather (1873-1947 A.D.)
• James Joyce (1882-1941 A.D.)
• Virginia Woolf (1882-1941 A.D.)
• Franz Kafka (1883-1924 A.D.)

Modern (1920s to 1960s)

• Albert Einstein (1879-1955 A.D.)
• T.S. Eliot (1888-1965 A.D.)
• J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973 A.D.)
• Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957 A.D.)
• E.E. Cummings (1894-1962 A.D.)
• William Faulkner (1897-1962 A.D.
• C.S. Lewis (1898-1963 A.D.)
• Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961 A.D.)
• E.B. White (1899-1985 A.D.)
• George Orwell (1903-1950 A.D.)
• Truman Capote (1924-1894 A.D.)
• Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964 A.D.)
• Ian Fleming (1908-1964 A.D.)
• E.B. White

Post-Modern (1960s to today)

• Norman Mailer (1923)
• William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925)
• Toni Morrison (1931)
• Tom Wolfe (1931)
• Joan Didion (1934)