Over at Commentary, you can find a list of the American writers ranked by the amount of scholarly writing they have generated over the last 25 years. Henry James leads the list–scholars have written 3,188 pieces about his work.
Many of these writers have free eBooks available online. We’ve created a list below linking to free digital book editions of works by these writers.
Here’s more about the list: “Over the past 25 years, Henry James has been the top-ranked American writer, according to the latest MLA International Bibliography. More than 3,000 pieces of scholarship have been devoted to him in whole or part since 1987 … Here are the top American writers as determined by the amount of scholarship on each. In brackets is the rise or fall of each writer when compared to his or her ranking since 1947.”
Free eBooks from the MLA Rankings of Writers (Plus number of items)
1. Henry James (3,188 items)
2.William Faulkner (2,955)
3. T. S. Eliot (2,659)
4. Herman Melville (2,579)
5. Vladimir Nabokov (2,290)
6. Ernest Hemingway (2,220)
7. Edgar Allan Poe (1,958)
8.Toni Morrison (1,950)
9. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1,751)
10. Walt Whitman (1,647)
11. Emily Dickinson (1,623)
12. Ezra Pound (1,620)
13. Willa Cather (1,482)
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1,326)
15. Wallace Stevens (1,122)
16. Edith Wharton (1,087)
17. Henry David Thoreau (1,076)
18. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1,002)
19. Flannery O’Connor (935)
20. Mark Twain (882)