Almost all of the authors you've mentioned are in a very similar style - highly descriptive or even poetic prose, deep imagery, often long with many side-branchings and digressions. Now I'm not saying that these authors aren't great - but it's not the only mark of greatness. Consider the ability to set a scene in spare and tight prose, to bring characters to life vividly in a few words, to make the reader consider and rethink a social or moral issue - is doing these well not worthy of greatness? Take Harper Lee, for example - To Kill a Mockingbird is very different from those you mention, but excluding it feels like saying Picasso's Guernica is not great beacuse it's not a Monet.

[For the record, whilst I enjoy the Wheel of Time a lot, even in modern fantasy it's only one of my favourites rather than a clear winner and, good as he is, I wouldn't claim Jordan will go down through the ages].

I'll admit to having read only half of those you mention. I'm not argue against any of them (any book still admired centuries on is likely to be 'great' regardless of my personal taste). But those I'd personally rate of them are Marquez, Eco, Dante, Orwell, Huxley, Dumas and Swift. I disagree with you about Steinbeck and Hemingway - I think both are consistently excellent - but agree in not thinking much of Joyce or the Brontes. I've also never personally been able to see the appeal of Salinger, Rushdie, Cervantes or any Russian author with the exception of Solzhenitsyn - Tolstoy and Bulgakov were OK, but I struggled through; I never managed to finish any others.

My own list would look quite different and I think broader in style. From the top of my head, I'd push for:

[b]20th Century[/b]
- Vikram Seth: I'd say An Equal Music was even better than A Suitable Boy.
- C. P. Snow: Sparseness of prose that allows him to depict characters and their choices with great depth.
- Harper Lee: Incredibly powerfully written and accessibly moral call to arms.
- Steinbeck and Hemingway, as discussed aboe.
- A. S. Byatt: for the beauty of her language, both poetry and prose, in Possession.
- Herman Wouk: The Caine Mutiny is a masterpiece in claustrophobia; The Winds of War/War and Remembrance a similar mastery of the epic, whilst Marjorie Morningstar and A Hole in Texas show he can write well, if not to the same level, in radically different styles.
- Orwell: Again, very powerfully written and sparse prose.
- Tolkein: I can (and have) read Lord of the Rings over and and over just for the richness of the language and description.
- Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle and A Day in the Life of... are opposites in style and equally strong.
- Douglas Hofstadter: comes close to blurring the edge between fiction and non-fiction in his cross-disciplinary writing (Godel Escher Bach being the most well-known).

[b]19th Century[/b]
- Dumas: As you've described.
- Kipling: One who literary people love to hate, but his plots, characters and vividness of setting shine through - and he did it for children, adults, short stories, novels and poetry.
- Gaskell: Like the Brontes tried to do, but she succeeded.
- Austen: Genuinely funny and moving.
- Chesterton: For his prolificness and range of style from non-fiction books and essays, through popular detective to Orwellian dystopia.
- Verne: Not just his imagination, but for his characters.
- Conan Doyle: Each story is masterfully crafted.
(I find Dickens quite mixed)

[b]The very old[/b]
- Swift: as you described
- Ovid and Virgil: both superior to Homer in my opinion; genuinely enjoyable and gripping.
(I guess I've not read that much of the very old).

I'd welcome your views on these - particularly if you'd consider them 'not great', I'd ask why.