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| According to WorldCat 100 Identities, the two biggest authors in world literature, according to library books representation, are: William Shakespeare and Johann Goethe, respectively. [2] |
See main: WorldCat 100The WorldCat 100 rankings lists the top 43 literary authors of all time, ranked by world library holdings, according to 2011 WorldCat Identities library rankings, as culled from the top 100 identities (shown adjacent) of the worlds libraries, non-literary authors removed:
"Words like 'great' and 'genius' could aptly be used for but a select number of artists–for Michelangelo or say Shakespeare. In the United States, the works of these great artists have been incorporated into popular culture as the epitome of visual and linguistic beauty. By contrast, on these shores, Goethe's works remain largely unread and rarely discussed except among college students, most of whom develop a healthy dose of amnesia shortly after graduation."One possible explanation as to why this is so could possibly have something to do with a carry-over aversion to anything German by Americans in the aftermath of WWI and WWII. The fact that American Ralph Waldo Emerson, who rose to literary fame prior to WWI, was a Goethean philosopher, would seem to corroborate this possibility. Whatever the case, it is indeed a puzzling paradox? The obliviousness of Americans to genius, literary, scientific, and philosophical, of Goethe is so pronounced that, to exemplify, it took American electrochemical engineer Libb Thims eleven years and nearly 1,000-books to find Goethe, which he did in 2006, following a decade of search and research for the person to have applied chemical thermodynamics reaction prediction methods to human chemical reactions (see: Thims history), where prior to this he had absolutely no idea who this "Goethe" person was, but has since amassed about a 30-book Goethe library collection surrounding his work, similar to Einstein who had a 52-volume collected set of Goethe's work (along with a bust of him); or possibly similar to Nietzsche who stated that the "best German book there is" was Johann Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe.
“Charles LaPorte points out that Swinburne is both continuing a tradition of Victorian bardolatry with constructed Shakespeare as the ‘greatest author ever’, while deliberately invoking the idea of ‘one book’ which civilization cannot afford to lose, only to replace its familiar referent, the Bible, with Shakespeare.”— Travis DeCook (2011), “Apocalyptic Archives” (Ѻ)
“Goethe was raised to the rank of Shakespeare.”— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams
