MLA rankings of American writers
Ordered by “the amount of scholarship.” Changes in position noted in brackets.
- Henry James (3,188 items) [+1]
- William Faulkner (2,955) [-1]
- T. S. Eliot (2,659) [+1]
- Herman Melville (2,579) [-1]
- Vladimir Nabokov (2,290) [+5]
- Ernest Hemingway (2,220)
0 - Edgar Allan Poe (1,958) [-2]
- Toni Morrison (1,950) [+9]
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1,751) [-4]
- Walt Whitman (1,647) [-2]
- Emily Dickinson (1,623) [+2]
- Ezra Pound (1,620) [-3]
- Willa Cather (1,482) [+5]
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1,326) [-3]
- Wallace Stevens (1,122) [-1]
- Edith Wharton (1,087) [+5]
- Henry David Thoreau (1,076) [-5]
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1,002) [-3]
- Flannery O’Connor (935) [+3]
- Mark Twain (882) [-4]
- John Steinbeck (823) [+2]
- William Carlos Williams (772)
0 - Saul Bellow (706) [+2]
- Richard Wright (670) [+2]
- Robert Frost (661) [-5]
