Your Favorite Writers, Ranked by Height

I wasn’t going to write this list. I wasn’t going to, but then I mentioned it, half-joking, in the Literary Hub office. Turns out everyone was extremely excited about finding out how tall their favorite writers were (or are). Who knew, right? Anyway, I decided to do it after all. Because it is fun. If you don’t think it’s fun, well, I don’t have to explain my art to you.

In total, I researched the heights of 36 writers: 15 women and 21 men. The average height of these writers is five foot eight. The most common height on this list is six foot even. Five writers on this list are six foot even, and three of them are women. The shortest author is Charlotte Brontë, at an incredible four feet and nine inches. The tallest author is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, at seven feet and two inches. The tallest author never to have played in the NBA (that I know of) is Michael Crichton. I was unable to discover the exact height of Jonathan Franzen. I won’t give any more of this very important and intellectually rigorous list away, so without any further ado, have fun (and tell me more writer heights in the comments, please—it’s weirdly addicting to know these things.)

THE RELATIVELY SHORT

Charlotte Brontë: 4’9″ (!!!)

Donna Tartt: 5’0″
(Or as she puts it, “the exact same size as Lolita”)

Joan Didion: 5’1″
(Almost small enough to fit in a tote bag)

Thomas Hardy: 5’1″

Anne Rice: 5’2″

Truman Capote: 5’4″

Dorothy Parker: 5’4″

William Faulkner: 5’5″
(Rejected from the US Army for being too short; had to resort to Canada)

H.G. Wells: 5’5″

James Baldwin: 5’6″

Martin Amis: 5’6″

Wilkie Collins: 5’6″

*

THE SQUARELY MEDIUM

Shirley Jackson: 5’6″

Emily Brontë: 5’7″

Agatha Christie: 5’7″

J.R.R. Tolkien: 5’8 1/2″
(Average Hobbit height is 3’6″)

Sylvia Plath: 5’9″

Emma Straub: 5’10”

Vladimir Nabokov: 5’11”

Siri Hustvedt: 6’0″

Maya Angelou: 6’0″

Franz Kafka: 6’0″

Octavia Butler: 6’0″

Ernest Hemingway: 6’0″

*

THE QUITE TALL

Dashiell Hammet: 6’1″

Jane Smiley: 6’2″

Oscar Wilde: 6’2″

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: 6’2″

William Makepeace Thackeray: 6’3″

Karl Ove Knausgaard: 6’3″

Ta-Nehisi Coates: 6’4″

Thomas Wolfe: 6’6″

Robert Sherwood: 6’8″

Michael Crichton: 6’9″
(Taller than some dinosaurs)

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: 7’2″
(Yes, he’s a real writer!)