James Joyce was weird. It was PAINFUL to vote against Shakespeare, but I can't deny my midwestern love for Samuel Clemons. Mark Twain FTW!

Wait, what?

Why is Ayn Rand, who moved to US at the age of 21 and published only in English, representing Russia? Moreover, why is the photo that is supposedly of her is actually of Pola Negri?

Ayn Rand? Really? She's the best (only?) Russian writer that Woot has heard of? Were Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky DQ'd for some reason? Maybe they failed their drug tests? I've heard that doping was very common among the literati.

Yeah, I call a do over. No way is Ayn Rand a better writer than Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin or Nabokov--even allowing for the subjectivity that goes into lists like this.

Maybe I don't understand the contest, but I would have assumed the group of countries represented by the choices would remain the same for each category. Otherwise, how does the final scoring work?

Argh! 5- or 6-way tie here. I can't decide!

Honestly, it came down to Twain or Shakespeare. The others, while very good at their craft, haven't had the same kind of influence on literature as those two did. I give the nod to Twain simply because I see Shakespeare as being based in poetry where I take the term author more in conjunction with prose.

Can't believe France wasn't represented. Jules Verne doesn't get in, but Ayn Rand does? Travesty.

Greece's Homer? Sophocles? Aristophanes? Aeschylus? Euripides? Plato? Aristotle?

Italy's Dante? Vergil? Cicero? Lucretius? Plautus (source for much of Shakespeare's comedy)? Boccaccio?

It's a shame that these two countries, the fount of western literature, weren't included -- not to mention all the awesome non-western literature that didn't make the cut!