Best prose stylists in English literature?

[ktr]

I think Kerouac deserves mention, his prose is clear and there are pieces infused with the early jazz of his time, which he brings to the page in bright bursts of color.

you're a genius.

Borges himself is surely not far removed from a writer like Swift or Sterne.

kind of funny you say that, as sterne did his best to distance himself from swift.

"I ... deny I have gone as far as Swift: he keeps a due distance from Rabelais; I keep a due distance from him."

he believed himself to be a successor in the style of rabelais, not really a swift-like contemprirarythingamjig

[mal4mac]

Most consistently good prose stylist or best, in sustained bursts? I'd probably nominate Evelyn Waugh for the first and Hardy for the second (I'm trying to avoid a few obvious choices). I'm a pretty serious Christian and bits of Tess of D'urbervilles knock me off my feet.

Sounds like you're now a pretty serious doubter.

"But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked."

Ouch! Did you manage to get up from the floor after that?

"...the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order."

Ouch! That does for Bertrand Russell as well.

Hardy is great.

Of course, Hardy's tragic sense occasionally leads him to write wordy clunkers, but he's capable of almost unmatched sublimity.

A good description.

I've read about five of his novels and not a bad one amongst them. Many more to go!

[Drkshadow03]

Stephen King, of course!

[Smooth Operator]

How about a Faulkner mention?

Hemingway is about structure, a sort of objective correlative. His prose is empty without context. Check out Faulkner's Absalom Absalom! for prose style. I think it has the longest sentence in all of literature. He approaches late-Joyce as far as style.

Literary non-fiction: Samuel Johnson.

[WICKES]

Evelyn Waugh wrote beautiful prose.

P G Wodehouse was a master of the English language as well. In fact Wodehouse almost created a language of his own (some have compared him to Shakespeare for his way with language- and they are not joking).

[minstrelbard]

Hemingway is about structure, a sort of objective correlative. His prose is empty without context.

I don't understand what this means. Can you clarify your point about Hemingway's style?

Check out Faulkner's Absalom Absalom! for prose style. I think it has the longest sentence in all of literature. He approaches late-Joyce as far as style.

I tried to read Absalom, Absalom about thirty years ago, but my way was blocked by an immense mountain range of words through which there appeared to be no pass. I've read scraps of Faulkner since, so, with a bit more training, I might try Absalom, Absalom again. I hope it's worth the effort - Faulkner doesn't make it easy.

[Astromaxis]

To me one of the best prose stylist is Margaret Atwood. As one of my friends stated and I agreed that her novels touch on the poetics of language as she is a poet as well but Woolf and Joyce she can extract meaning in language and present it to us. Be her works psychological or post-apocalyptic she does bleed great logic and feeling into them. A visceral and cerebral concoction of great zygotic transmissions.

[Smooth Operator]

minstrelbard, regarding the objective correlative read T S Eliot's Hamlet and His problems. Basically he says that meaning and emotion should be tacit or implicit in the text, not explicit.
And Absalom Absalom was a difficult book, but completely rewarding if you can get through it.

[WildWildEast]

James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner.

[Gregory Samsa]

I would say Nabokov. He could write wonderful and with humor. The style is characterized by word play, double entendres, anagrams and so on. Like Lionel Trilling said about Lolita: "we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents [...] we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting."

[breathtest]

kerouac any day of the week

[stlukesguild]

kerouac any day of the week

Accck!!

[Emil Miller]

kerouac any day of the week

Accck!!

Now, now StLukes don't be unkind about beatniks.

[miyako73]

amy tan

[Sebas. Melmoth]

Pater's essays of aesthetic criticism in The Renaissance are recognized as being the purplest of English prose.
http://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-St...9821667&sr=1-3

Wilde's prose very wonderful, although Pater thought it too close to actual speech; on the other hand, who in goddes' name ever spoke like Wilde?
Yeats testifies that Wilde spoke so perfectly that his extemporaneous speech could have been transcribed onto paper exactly as it stood without changes of any kind.

Somerset Maugham wrote a very nice English with an excellent vocabulary, nice syntax, and good punctuation.

Ditto Orwell who also turned out an essay on English composition which is much admired by university English professors.

Dreiser's prose has been much criticized (he grew up in a German-speaking household) but I admire his novels greatly: Sister Carrie, Jeannie Gerhardt, The Financier, and An American Tragedy.

Melville's tortured syntax is a marvel.

Conrad's syntax is also often difficult, but his masterpiece Heart of Darkness is a magnificent example of Flaubert's technique of le mot juste.

D. H. Lawrence was a nice English stylist.

Poe too wrote a very nice English with much aural appeal.

See:
http://www.amazon.com/N-O-V-E-L-101-...hor_title_full