Do you think some authors are objectively better than others?

If we were to measure the quality of all canonical authors, would there be a normal distribution and some authors would be clearly at the very top? Below is a list of commonly recommended authors. Do you think all of them have a similar merit? Do you think all of them should be read equally? Or do some of them stand above all others?

Abe, Adams, Aesop, Aichinger, Aitmatov, Alain-Fournier, Alas, Alcott, Alighieri, Altenberg, Amis, Andreev, Andrić, Aristotle, Atwood, Austen, Auster, Babel, Bachmann, Baldwin, Ballard, Balzac, Barnes, Barth, Bassani, Baudelaire, Beckett, Bellow, Bely, Bernhard, Beyer, Blake, Blanchot, Boccaccio, Böll, Bons, Borges, Bradbury, Brecht, Brenner, Broch, Brontë, Brooke-Rose, Büchner, Bulgakov, Bunin, Burgess, Buzzati, Byatt, Calvino, Camus, Canetti, Carlyle, Carr, Carroll, Céline, Cendrars, Cervantes, Chandler, Chaucer, Chekhov, Christie, Cicero, Cleland, Coetzee, Cohen, Conrad, Cooper, Däfler, Dazai, Defoe, DeLillo, Diamond, Dickens, Diderot, Döblin, Doctorow, Doderer, Donoso, Dostoevsky, Dovlatov, Doyle, Droste-Hülshoff, Dumas, Duras, Dürrenmatt, Eco, Efremov, Eliot, Ellison, Erofeev, Faulkner, Fielding, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Follett, Fontane, Ford, Forster, Franzen, Franzobel, Franzos, Frisch, Gaddis, Gass, Gates, Gibran, Gibson, Gide, Goethe, Gogol, Golding, Goldman, Goncharov, Gorky, Gotthelf, Gottsched, Grahame, Grass, Guareschi, Hailey, Hamsun, Handke, Hardy, Hašek, Hauptmann, Hawking, Hawthorne, Hebel, Heinlein, Heller, Hemingway, Herzen, Hesse, Highsmith, Hoffmann, Hogg, Hölderlin, Homer, Horváth, Hugo, Hurston, Huxley, Huysmans, Ibsen, Irving, Ishiguro, James, Jelinek, Johnson, Joyce, Kadare, Kafka, Kazantzakis, Kehlmann, Keller, Kerouac, Kertész, Kharms, Kipling, Kishon, Kleist, Koeppen, Kracht, Krasznahorkai, Kraus, Kundera, Laclos, Lampedusa, Lawrence, Laxness, Lee, Lehane, Lem, Lenz, Lermontov, Leskov, Lessing, Levi, Lewis, Lispector, Lohmanm, London, Lowry, Lucretius, Malraux, Mann, Manzoni, Márquez, Martin, Marx, Maugham, Maurier, Mayakovsky, McCarthy, McElroy, McEwan, McMurtry, Melville, Menasse, Meredith, Miller, Milton, Mishima, Montaigne, Morrison, Msihima, Murakami, Murdoch, Musil, Nabokov, Noble, O'Brien, Orwell, Ostrovsky, Pamuk, Passos, Pasternak, Paul, Paustovsky, Peake, Percy, Perec, Pessoa, Petrov, Plath, Platonov, Poe, Proust, Pushkin, Pynchon, Quevedo, Quincey, Rabelais, Rachinger, Rand, Remarque, Rhys, Rilke, Rosa, Roth, Rulfo, Rushdie, Saint-Exupéry, Salinger, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Schiller, Schmidt, Schnitzler, Scott, Sebald, Shalamov, Shelley, Sholokhov, Smith, Sokolov, Sologub, Solzhenitsyn, Sorokin, Stein, Steinbeck, Stendhal, Sterne, Stevenson, Stifter, Storm, Svevo, Swift, Szatmary, Tepl, Thackeray, Theroux, Thompson, Tieck, Tokarczuk, Tolkien, Tolstoy, Toole, Torberg, Trollope, Turgenev, Twain, Updike, Verne, Virgil, Voltaire, Vonnegut, Walker, Walpole, Walser, Waugh, Wells, West, Wharton, Whitman, Wieland, Wilde, Wittgenstein, Wodehouse, Wolfe, Woolf, Yourcenar, Zamyatin, Zola, Zweig