>>>>>> There is little disagreement that he was the greatest writer in history, as you say.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Disagree. He is the "greatest" only to those who believe he is the greatest. Who has sampled all the writers that ever were? And how will they be compared across styles and times and other metrics? "The greatest" - a pointless attribution other than as a purely personal, culturally and traditionally subjective opinion.
>>>
>>>I agree with the disagreement. For certain definitions of "greatest" this may be true - for instance, as in "greatest among the authors known to those who were educated in an english-speaking country".
>>
>>You would actually need to extend this list of qualification much further because can we compare poets with play-writes with story-tellers? Can we compare a writer from 1000 years ago to today? Can we compare an American writer with an English one? You end up with such a long list of qualifiers that the title becomes worthless.
>
>No, we sure can't.
>
>So I will revise my statement -- Graham Greene was the greatest writer writing in English in the 20th century.
>
>Just so I don't sound hopelessly parochial, Roberto Bolano may be regarded 100 years from now as the writer of his time. My suspicion is he will. I had the same feeling about the rock band X -- they were radically different.

These are all statements of a purely subjective and very limited value since you have not even begun to sample, to any meaningful extent, the writings of the multitude of authors out there, even in a single language. All you can do is preface such statements with the words "in my opinion and with my limited exposure I think writer X is the greatest.". In other words these statements are without much merit beyond stating an opinion, and you know what they say about opinions ;)