[dextorious]

And, to qualify my answer, I'm thinking Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hoffmann, James, Balzac, Poe, Stendhal, Dickens, Melville, Flaubert, Hugo, Conrad, Mann, Proust, Lawrence, Rilke, Kafka, Fitzgerald, Gide, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Miller, Musil, etc...

[DaveMebs]

I don't think you can really compare the last 50 years (anything more recent and it's really hard to judge how 'great' an author will be) with a 150 year period. Especially when you are including the Lost Generation which was, frankly, contemporary in 1945. Hemingway hadn't even published "The Old Man and the Sea" at that point.