He asked Americans what they thought, and the politicians listened.

83 James Fenimore Cooper

The novels are unreadable, but he was the first great mythologizer of the frontier.

84 Thurgood Marshall

As a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, he was the legal architect of the civil-rights revolution.

85 Ernest Hemingway

His spare style defined American modernism, and his life made machismo a cliché.

86 Mary Baker Eddy

She got off her sickbed and founded Christian Science, which promised spiritual healing to all.

87 Benjamin Spock

With a single book—and a singular approach—he changed American parenting.

88 Enrico Fermi

A giant of physics, he helped develop quantum theory and was instrumental in building the atomic bomb.

89 Walter Lippmann

The last man who could swing an election with a newspaper column.

90 Jonathan Edwards

Forget the fire and brimstone: his subtle eloquence made him the country’s most influential theologian.

91 Lyman Beecher

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s clergyman father earned fame as an abolitionist and an evangelist.

92 John Steinbeck

As the creator of Tom Joad, he chronicled Depression-era misery.