I would vote for Steinbeck above Twain or Hemingway any day (personal opinion).
Given that a female author would be good, how about; Shakespeare, Dickens, Steinbeck and Austen.
Personally, I don’t like Austen and would maybe leave her out in favour of somebody from outside of the US or the UK.
Shakespeare, Chaucer, Joyce, and, oh let’s say Austen. (Maybe that’ll get those broads to stop asking for suffrage.)
Shaw is another good choice that I don’t think has been mentioned. I don’t think he’d make my top 4, but he’d be close.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I know he wouldn’t be on the final four, but he’s make a good run on the playoffs.
Ahh, as stated by the OP, it’s “the Mount Rushmore” of English.
So unless you think those 4 US presidents are the best political leaders of all time in all the world, only US authors would apply to the question.
Tom Wolfe, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delany and Allen Ury.
With one nork hanging out - tastefully though.
Shakespeare, Hemingway, A.S. Byatt, Dickens
Poets don’t count as literature, huh?
Yes, I know Shakespeare was a poet too, and a couple of others have been mentioned, but basically people just seem to be throwing around the names of novelists here.
Poe was also mentioned in the OP, and we’ve had T.S. Eliot, Whitman, Chaucer, Milton; Joyce and Tolkien wrote poetry as well as novels…given what a limited number of writers have been mentioned at all so far, looks like a fair number of poets to me.
Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Steinbeck.
Shakespeare - Well, I mean c’mon. How could he not be up there?
Dickens - Probably the first great novelist. Iconic works.
Twain - Master storyteller. The first truly great American fiction writer.
Steinbeck - The epitomy of the modern novelist.
Austen and Hemingway both come close, but those four are who I’d pick.
njtt - while poetry is part of literature based on the definition, I think most people tend to think of poetry and prose* as separate things. I know I usually do. Now, a Mount Rushmore of Poetry* would be damn interesting (so would one for music for that matter).
Poe needs to be on there somewhere. Poe basically invented modern detective fiction. Any other writers who created an entire bookstore section, step forward!
I’d take Austen over Twain, if only because we could then wire a generator to Twain’s corpse and power the country for a year.
I thought of Austen, but… well really, only because she is a woman. Otherwise she doesn’t get into the top four. And did Mary Shelly write anything truly important aside from Frankenstein? I confess my ignorance.
With Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain and Steinbeck we have the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries represented – for chonological diversity is there anyone from the 18th c. who should be included? Swift? Defoe? Voltaire? Burns?
I was wondering if King James deserves a spot, representing the group that actually did the translation work. I mean, as far as direct quotations and cultural references go, the King James Bible is probably ahead even of Shakespeare, and no comparison to whoever is in third place.
Dan Brown*, Tom Clancy*, Jeffrey Archer and Stephenie Meyer. Just so I could then dynamite it.
(Tbh, I always find these lists kind of pointless. I don’t think it’s possible to make a coherent case that puts four writers in a different category from all others. The nearest I can get is to go by literary influence, which might yield Shakespeare, Dickens(?), Tolkien and… one other.)
As another aside, I never realised that Mount Rushmore was originally intended to look like this, but they ran out of funds. Good job they started on the faces…
*Disclaimer, I quite enjoyed The Da-Vinci Code and a couple early Clancys, but I chose them as their overall career trajectory screams “hack”.
Voltaire for English Literature? :dubious:
If you really want chronological diversity, you could go back to Chaucer.
The real Mt. Rushmore only goes back to the turn of the 20th century, so you could justify doing the same for this.
If it were up to me, right now I’m leaning toward Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, and Twain.
:smack:
In my defense, my copy of Voltaire is in English! 
I would disqualify the committee who produced the KJV because, although it was a very impressive achievement, it wasn’t an original work or the work of one person.
In my 11th grade American Literature class, we had to write a paper making a comparative study of two novels. We were asked to submit a list of books we had recently read. My list included Hesse’s Steppenwolf; the teacher suggested I do my paper on that and Candide. So the subjects of my American Lit paper were a German book and a French one.
Shakespeare, Eliot, Dickens, Twain
Chaucer deserves much more pub than he’s been getting. He’s the FIRST. the George Washington of Brit Lit. In fact, I consider him almost as mandatory as Shakespeare (washington and lincoln).
The last 2 spots can be hashed out either way between dickens, twain, steinbeck, hemmingway, poe, faulkner, etc. and it wouldn’t really matter too much. just to add some poets into the mix, dickenson, cummings, angelou…
really i think brit lit and american lit have to be separate mounts. the scope is just too vast and prolific.
