Follow Business Insider: You've seen Google's annual lists of trendy search terms, featuring things like  robin williams, world cup, and ebola , but those show only the most unusually popular terms, not the most popular terms overall.
Murasaki Shikibu is the best known writer to emerge from Japan's glorious Heian period. Her novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji-monogatari) is considered to be one of the world's finest and earliest novels. Some argue that Murasaki is the world's first modern novelist.
Henrik Ibsen is famously known as the Father of Modern Drama, and it is worth recognizing how literal an assessment that is. The Norwegian playwright was not merely one of a wave of new writers to experiment with dramatic form, nor did he make small improvements that were built upon by successors.