There are a few things to keep in mind when studying this section
When studying for the literature section make sure you study by the author as appose to learning facts about individual pieces of literature. This will allow you to memorize more information.
For an author you should know the following…
I will show you how a good summary of an author looks with Voltaire as an example…
Voltaire wrote more than what is just written above, but these are some of the most important works. You can of course, if you have time, go deeper.
You should also try read or watch a quick summary of the books written by the author, so that you have a better idea of what the book is about. This will avoid you mixing up books with each other.
*Note: Some authors fall into sections such as philosophy, economics etc, I have not included these authors in the below list as they will be covered in other sections.
*Note: Non-English-speaking authors generally wrote the title of their book in their native language and that title has an English translation. For the IMAT you should remember the English name.
Most important (in no particular order) …
Virgil
Apuleius
Leo Tolstoy
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Miguel de Cervantes
Desiderius Erasmus
Charles Dickens
Agatha Christie
Alexander Pushkin
Giovanni Verga
Luigi Pirandello
Dante Alighieri
Ovid
Jules Verne
Niccolò Machiavelli
Giovanni Boccaccio
Alessandro Manzoni
Carlo Collodi
Herodotus
Beowulf (the name of the author is unknown)
Giovanni Pascoli
William Shakespeare
Cicero
Horace
Francesco Petrarca
Ludovico Ariosto
Alberto Moravia
Aristophanes
Sophocles
Alessandro Manzoni
Gabriele D’Annunzio
Important (in no particular order)
Jonathan Swift
Gustave Flaubert
Mark Twain
Goethe
William Golding
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Victor Hugo
C.S Lewis
Rumi
Ian Fleming
Elena Ferrante
Ernest Hemingway
Herbert George Wells
James Joyce
Charlotte Brontë
Marcel Proust
Robert Louis Stevenson
Harper Lee
Murasaki Shikibu
T.S. Eliot
George Orwell
Alexandre Dumas
Herman Melville
Jane Austen
Emily Brontë
Daniel Dafoe
Laurence Sterne
J.R.R. Tolkien
Sun Tzu
Robert Frost
Edgar Allan Poe
Less important
You can (if you have time) add more authors than just the ones listed above.
What about more modern authors?