The Authorial Alphabet!

[Lord Macbeth]

Sorry I've been away so long, I was banished for chopping off...

I mean, classes have started again and taking four English courses, reading more on my own time, looking for a job, tutoring, writing on my own time, and getting dragged places by fellow English majors I never thought I'd go--what is white-as-anything, hates-Mexican-food Jew like me doing in an all-Catholic, all-Mexican restaurant and being asked if I'd consume a cake if it were in Shakespeare's image? ...You tell me--and it's been busy.

But I am returned from the Midterm Wars most gloriously, and with a new challenge:

The ABCs for Authors.

They can be fiction or non-fiction, but MUST have their most memorable works be works of literature or philosophy or some other writing (so no presidents writing autobiographies, for instance.)

So, we all know "S" is going to be for "Shakespeare," yes? Well, the other 25 letters and "S" I suppose...have at it!

[Lord Macbeth]

A is for Aristotle (Aquinas and Augustine come close, as do Austen and fellow Greek Aristophanes, but Plato’s Pupil wins out)

B is for the Bronte Sisters (cheating, but Charlotte, Emily, and Anne are all so great…if I must pick one, Charlotte)

C is for Chaucer (I don’t see any contest here…Conrad, maybe, but “Nostromo” literally puts me to sleep, so…)

D is for Dante (Descartes, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky all are clamoring for this spot, and deserve it...but Dante condemns them to wait!)

E is for Eliot, specifically, T.S. (“George Eliot”/Mary Ann Evans would be interesting here…but The Waste Land clinches it for T.S.)

F is for Faulkner (I don’t care too much for him, but I again don’t see a great contestant here…maybe Flaubert, but still, Faulkner’s bigger today, so…)

G is for Goethe (As character and story-wise, no “F” in literature beats out “Faust.”)

H is for Homer (The Father of Western Literature…”The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” are amazing, and when YOU’RE read nearly 2,500 years after you’re gone...) ;)

I is for Ibsen (An easy pick here, “A Doll’s House” and “Hedda Gabler” alone would be enough, but “The Wild Duck,” “Ghosts,” An Enemy of the People”…)

J is for Joyce (I have reservations with Joyce and Henry James, but as

K is for Kafka (I considered Kierkegaard, Keats, and Kipling, but Kafka’s biggest today, I think…oh, and anyone expecting King, first name Stephen…no.)

L is for Locke (I started reading “Women In Love” by D.H. Lawrence this afternoon, and it’s great, but while he argued all men are created equal, Locke most definitely was not.)

M is for Milton (Yes, for “Milton,” but also for “misogynist…Melville and Marx also have good candidacies, bit an epic poem with Satan? I’m a sucker for that!)

N is for Nietzsche (WHO ELSE would I pick here? No one even comes close…with “N” to begin their last names, at least.)

O is for Orwell (You MUST pick him...Big Brother says so!) ;)

P is for Plato (An even easier pick than his pupil Aristotle for the list, though it saddens me Poe doesn’t crack the Authorial Alphabet)

Q is for Quick (Namely, Amanda Quick, just because I have no clue who to put here and a search revealed her name as the only real repeatedly-listed one…?)

R is for Rousseau (A leading philosopher of the Enlightenment, and first a friend and then a quarreler with David Hume…those are good qualifications right there!)

S is for Shakespeare (If you thought I’d pick anyone else…you are hereby considered even crazier than Hamlet, the Macbeths, and I!)

T is for Tolstoy (Right after Shakespeare…a man who couldn’t STAND Shakespeare and wrote epics himself! A shame Twain and Tennyson miss out, though…)

U is for Urquhart (Jane Urquhart? Again, I didn’t know who to put here, and felt the Canadians deserved someone on here…)

V is for Voltaire (Even if that wasn’t his real name, that’s what we remember him by…and “Candide” deserves mention.)

W is for Wilde (Edging out Williams, first name Tennessee, just barely, Wilde’s satires are about as good as William’s tragedies, so Wilde wins on “All art is quite useless.”)

X is for Xenephon (Because he was a Greek philosopher who defended Plato and…the only “X” I can think of here, I don’t know if Malcolm counts…?)

Y is for Yeats (Because he’s a good poet and…because I can’t think of many more “Y” names here.)

Z is for Emile Zola (And I’ll meekly admit I haven’t actually read her yet, but she was the only “Z” I could think of…I’ll get around to her, and if Zola’s a GUY—well, all the more meek I should stand, then, eh?) ;)


And that’s my Authorial Alphabet, folks!
Your turn? ;)