Literary Stylists

[cl154576]

I want to read some works by authors noted for very distinctive writing styles, preferably in English, but if the tone carries through translation that would also be fine. Does anyone have suggestions?

[Seasider]

Joyce. Woolf, Hemingway, for starters.

[cl154576]

Thank you. Any specific titles?

[Desolation]

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
On the Road by Jack Kerouac

[stlukesguild]

Lawrence Stern- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Edward Gibbon- The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire
Robert Burton- Anatomy of Melancholia
Jonathan Swift- Gulliver's Travels/A Modest Proposal
Oscar Wilde- The Picture of Dorian Gray
Walter Pater- The Renaissance
Herman Melville- Moby Dick
Ralph W. Emerson- Essays
Edgar Allen Poe- Short Stories
Henry James- Portrait of a Lady/Turn of the Screw
Virginia Woolf- Orlando
James Joyce- Ulysses
William Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
Joseph Conrad- Heart of Darkness/Lord Jim
Ernest Hemingway- Short Stories
Vladimir Nabokov- Lolita
F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby
Samuel Beckett- Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (trilogy)/Endgame
Lawrence Durrell- The Alexandrian Quartet (Justine, Balthasar, Mount Olive, Clea)
Thomas Pynchon- V
Gore Vidal- Myra Breckenridge/Justinian
Norman Mailer-Advertisements for Myself
John Boswell- The Life of Johnson
Samuel Johnson-Selected writings
Lewis Carroll- Alice in Wonderland/Through the Lookingglass

Just some examples of marvelous prose in English.

Poetry is a whole world in itself.

[Buh4Bee]

Kurt Vonnegut writing style seems deceptive at times as being too ordinary. He is gifted in his ability to tell an engaging story with humor and deep human emotion. He is in tune with the world and his writing style brings you into this world of fiction. He's highly engaging and a real humanist.

[JuniperWoolf]

Oh, give HP Lovecraft a try. He puts words together like nothing I've ever seen. His is the only work that I've encountered which I would love just for the prose style even if the content wasn't brilliant (which it is, by the way). He writes short stories, so don't bother with particular titles, just pick up any collection of works.

I also suggest Hemmingway, his prose is nice and raw. The short story A clean, Well-Lighted Place is my personal favorite which you could likely find online, but if you're looking for something a bit longer you might try The Old Man and the Sea.

Fitzgerald writes beautifully. I hated The Great Gatsby though, I'd sooner suggest a collection of his short stories (I'm starting to see a theme here).

[Raven Falcon.]

No one has mentioned Cormac Mccarthy?

I am surprised, but he is perhaps the best English language stylist alive.

If not the best, the most daring.

[NiMROD]

I second the Cormac McCarthy suggestion.

Perhaps W. Somerset Maughm could serve as your "control" author. Hah.

[Des Essientes]

The author of the most stylistically perfect short stories in English is Edgar Allen Poe.

[stlukesguild]

Yes... Cormac McCarthy is great... but his writing owes much to Melville... and even Shakespeare... and I would recommend getting some of the older works under one's belt before moving on to him.

[JuniperWoolf]

The author of the most stylistically perfect short stories in English is Edgar Allen Poe.

Says you, I hate Poe.

[Scheherazade]

The author of the most stylistically perfect short stories in English is Edgar Allen Poe.
Says you, I hate Poe.What? A disagreement over who the better writer is?

Well, I've never...

[JBI]

Says you, I hate Poe.

I agree, Poe's reputation is only so high as he occupies a spot hard to fill by other American authors and as such is the one Romantic era prose fiction writer that almost everyone in the US is forced to read. His style is not so innovative, though his particular synesthesia is a little intriguing. If I were to look for the best shot fiction writer in the States though, my first jumps would be at Hemmingway and then at Flannery O'Connor - almost by instinct. Then if I were to say English as a whole, I would jump to someone like Katherine Mansfield or Alice Munro.

Generally though short fiction is a continental European domain. It hardly factors into American traditions outside of a brief stint in the modernist era, I think primarily because printing when American presses took over was already cheap enough to get novels out - the brief stint of modernist writing, when people like Fitzgerald or Hemmingway could toss a story out for a periodical seems the last movements of a periodical-digesting time period. I mean, how many major serialized books can we think of in the American tradition even?

[Seasider]

Thurber wrote wonderful short stories.The Night the Bed Fell is something I can scarcely read for laughing. Dorothy Parker too.

[Melysnl]

If you want to read something a bit more contemporary with unique, stylish writing, try Something Happened by Joseph Heller. I finished it thinking I've never read anything quite like that before. He flaunted his prowess of words and didn't just tell a story, but turned words into art.

This book isn't for everyone though. It's a dark satire about American life and probably offends a great deal of the people who read it.

[stlukesguild]

I agree, Poe's reputation is only so high as he occupies a spot hard to fill by other American authors and as such is the one Romantic era prose fiction writer that almost everyone in the US is forced to read. His style is not so innovative, though his particular synesthesia is a little intriguing. If I were to look for the best shot fiction writer in the States though, my first jumps would be at Hemmingway and then at Flannery O'Connor - almost by instinct. Then if I were to say English as a whole, I would jump to someone like Katherine Mansfield or Alice Munro.

Generally though short fiction is a continental European domain. It hardly factors into American traditions outside of a brief stint in the modernist era, I think primarily because printing when American presses took over was already cheap enough to get novels out - the brief stint of modernist writing, when people like Fitzgerald or Hemmingway could toss a story out for a periodical seems the last movements of a periodical-digesting time period. I mean, how many major serialized books can we think of in the American tradition even?

Everything JBI has to say about American literature can largely be dismissed as being largely rooted in his usual anti-Americanism. Robert Hughes referred to it as the "cultural cringe"... the realization of the irrelevance of ones own culture on a given artistic genre. And the envy of the dominant cultures.:D

Seriously there are legitimate criticisms of Poe... but considering his impact upon Baudelaire, Gautier, and a great many European "decadents" and Symbolists... as well as Borges and a good portion of Latin-American literature, he is not anywhere near as minor as JBI (among others) would have us believe.

As for the American contributions to the short story, considering the efforts of Poe, Washington Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Nathaniel West, John Steinbeck, Phillip Roth, John Barth, Flannery O'Conner, Raymond carver, John Updike, Donald Barthleme, etc... it would see that the short story is more than a minor aspect of the American contribution to literature.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Pretty much all of what I was going to suggest has been suggested already. I'm with StLukes when it comes to Poe--he's excellent.

Choices I second:

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (not a Hemingway fan, but he is essential)
Jonathan Swift- Gulliver's Travels/A Modest Proposal (only read "A Modest Proposal")
Oscar Wilde- The Picture of Dorian Gray
Herman Melville- Moby Dick (one of the best novels ever)
Edgar Allen Poe- Short Stories
Virginia Woolf- Orlando (I've only read To The Lighthouse--wasn't crazy about it, but definitely essential when it comes to style)
James Joyce- Ulysses (never finished it, but again, definitely essential)
Joseph Conrad- Heart of Darkness/Lord Jim (another of my faves)
Ernest Hemingway- Short Stories (maybe a better choice to read his short stories, never read the myself)
F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby (great read)
Thomas Pynchon- V (even though Gravity's Rainbow is his most famous work, definitely a better starting place)

Definitely suggest H.P. Lovecraft. His novel/novella The Mountains of Madness is great, and so are his short stories.


No one has mentioned Cormac Mccarthy?

I am surprised, but he is perhaps the best English language stylist alive.

If not the best, the most daring.
Agree. McCarthy takes a lot of influence from other writers, but he does form a voice of his own.

The only writer I can think of to add would be Hawthorne.

[JBI]

I agree, Poe's reputation is only so high as he occupies a spot hard to fill by other American authors and as such is the one Romantic era prose fiction writer that almost everyone in the US is forced to read. His style is not so innovative, though his particular synesthesia is a little intriguing. If I were to look for the best shot fiction writer in the States though, my first jumps would be at Hemmingway and then at Flannery O'Connor - almost by instinct. Then if I were to say English as a whole, I would jump to someone like Katherine Mansfield or Alice Munro.

Generally though short fiction is a continental European domain. It hardly factors into American traditions outside of a brief stint in the modernist era, I think primarily because printing when American presses took over was already cheap enough to get novels out - the brief stint of modernist writing, when people like Fitzgerald or Hemmingway could toss a story out for a periodical seems the last movements of a periodical-digesting time period. I mean, how many major serialized books can we think of in the American tradition even?

Everything JBI has to say about American literature can largely be dismissed as being largely rooted in his usual anti-Americanism. Robert Hughes referred to it as the "cultural cringe"... the realization of the irrelevance of ones own culture on a given artistic genre. And the envy of the dominant cultures.:D

Seriously there are legitimate criticisms of Poe... but considering his impact upon Baudelaire, Gautier, and a great many European "decadents" and Symbolists... as well as Borges and a good portion of Latin-American literature, he is not anywhere near as minor as JBI (among others) would have us believe.

As for the American contributions to the short story, considering the efforts of Poe, Washington Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Nathaniel West, John Steinbeck, Phillip Roth, John Barth, Flannery O'Conner, Raymond carver, John Updike, Donald Barthleme, etc... it would see that the short story is more than a minor aspect of the American contribution to literature.

Why is it so hard a conjecture to say that in a world where markets of books were subject to the laws of economic production - that is to say, the cost of publishing, and the medium that things were published in - there would be a sense of nationalism? I am sorry, but the roots of nationalism are said to have been rooted in such medium - read for instance the book Imagined Communities which roots the source of the common nationalist sentiment directly in the communal sharing of authors - authors who are published in the most part directly to a growing shared community of national readers.

The same could be said of any other number of authors, many forgotten - Victorian England and Dickens, for instance, could have a similar affect, as could others.

As for influence, well, I didn't say he was all bad, nor did I say he wasn't influential - many ridiculously bad works have been highly influential in their time, and many really good books now have been totally forgotten - to same French symbolists loved Poe is not to say anything really about the work.

As for the short story in English. Look at sales - virtually all the major short story authors got their bacon off of novels - the English reading public has always favored longer texts - the market and the money have always favored longer texts.

[JuniperWoolf]

My dislike of Poe has nothing to do with anti-Americanism (the three authors I chose to suggest were all American), I just find his work boring and overrated, especially by as yet underexposed teenagers who are still in their Nietzche idolatry phase.

Sure, Poe was influential. So was Andy Warhol, and he sucked too.

[mortalterror]

I'm not a teenager, and I think that Poe was a great writer. Like his contemporary Alexandre Dumas most of his output isn't worth dwelling over, but there are a handful of his works which remain the best of their kind nearly two centuries later. The Casque of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Black Cat are all works of Romantic genius and deserve to be ranked alongside Chateaubriand's René, Lermontov's A Hero For Our Time, and Hoffman's The Sandman. The Raven, The Bells, and Annabel Lee aren't as good as Leopardi's Dream or Coleridge's Kubla Khan but they are still pretty decent and memorable.

[Panglossian]

Thomas Bernhard has a very distinctive writing style. -- You know when you have a problem and you talk to yourself and you go over the problem over and over again in your mind ... that's what his writing style is like: a realistic and honest depiction of mental dissonance. Very intense. It's a love it or hate it style, though. Long, rambling sentences. The Loser is his most well-known novel.

[Raven Falcon.]

Thomas Bernhard has a very distinctive writing style. -- You know when you have a problem and you talk to yourself and you go over the problem over and over again in your mind ... that's what his writing style is like: a realistic and honest depiction of mental dissonance. Very intense. It's a love it or hate it style, though. Long, rambling sentences. The Loser is his most well-known novel.
I've never read Fitzgerald before. Should I read him? If I am to, will I be able to understand his works? (I've read Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Milton, etc.)

I thank you for any recommendation given.

[YesNo]

I don't know what style is, so I hesitate to offer any writers with a unique style, but here goes:

1) Others mentioned Flannery O'Connor and I would recommend the short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find". I read it decades ago and it still haunts me.

2) John Gardner's October Light is also memorable. I read it recently since someone recommended it as a "postmodern" novel. I don't know if that's true, but it starts off with a bang, or rather a shotgun blast at a TV set someone is watching. It ends well and memorably. It covers a lot of detail in the lives of two old people and includes a novel within the novel for entertainment. Is that style?

3) I found Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club on my bookshelf. I saw the movie but never read the novel although I have started it now. It begins with a short story which introduces the novel. Although only a page long this introductory short story is one of the best I've ever read.

[Stewed]

Brett Easton Ellis
Martin Amis
If I can throw in a critic, George Steiner
VS Naipaul maybe, though I'm not sure the voice really jumps out at you.
Salman Rushdie

[Darcy88]

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[mortalterror]

Everything JBI has to say about American literature can largely be dismissed as being largely rooted in his usual anti-Americanism. Robert Hughes referred to it as the "cultural cringe"... the realization of the irrelevance of ones own culture on a given artistic genre. And the envy of the dominant cultures.:D

Seriously there are legitimate criticisms of Poe... but considering his impact upon Baudelaire, Gautier, and a great many European "decadents" and Symbolists... as well as Borges and a good portion of Latin-American literature, he is not anywhere near as minor as JBI (among others) would have us believe.

I wouldn't dismiss JBI's opinion that easily. Although, on the surface his dislike of Poe could be chalked up to anti-American resentment along with his distaste for The Great Gatsby, he has on occasion expressed a fondness for other American writers. Therefore, it would at least be politic to take him at his word and explore why he doesn't like Poe. Perhaps, he isn't a fan of the horror genre, or of the supernatural. Poe's era may not necessarily be to his taste. I'd like to know what he thinks of Hans Christian Andersen's short stories such as The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Mother, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier, which I feel are analogous to the kind of work Poe was doing in the States.

[kinesj]

Here's a few I would recommend


Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
My Life as a Man by Philip Roth
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Them by Joyce Carol Oates
White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
The Long March by William Styron
Myra Breckenridge by Gore Vidal
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabakov
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men By James Agee
Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
Native Son by Richard Wright
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

[Panglossian]

I've never read Fitzgerald before. Should I read him? If I am to, will I be able to understand his works? (I've read Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Milton, etc.)

My post was about Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. I didn't mention Fitzgerald. I haven't read any Fitzgerald. -- I'd suggest Nabokov as a supreme stylist. If you havent already, check out his most unique novel Pale Fire.

[BobinBrazil]

Cormac McCarthy
James Salter
Isaac Babel

........... for word pictures, imagery, style.

[BobinBrazil]

This could get out of hand. Quite a few terrific literary stylists.

Ok, ok. Add Joseph Conrad, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. Hemingway's predecessor, Gertrude Stein- if you like ultra pared down.

[ajvenigalla]

There are William Shakespeare, John Milton, Henry James, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marilynne Robinson, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Frost, John Ashbery, and many many more great stylists.

[kev67]

Kazuo Ishiguro is rather difficult to mistake for anyone else.
Laurie Lee has his own particularly stylish style too.

[Eiseabhal]

I was re-reading the original question at the head of this thread. It seems to be made of at least two bits. One bit mentions distinctive style and the other bit mentions tone. Everyone who writes has his or her own distinctive style. A schoolteacher can usually identify plagiarism in a teenager's work because even if an attempt has been made to conceal it there will be a distinctive clash of style. Criminals have been caught because their threatening missives, poison-pen letters, forged suicide notes have revealed them by their style. Of course this is accidental style - but style nonetheless. Uppermost in the original questioner's mind is the studied style of the professional artist or creative writer. This may very well be the deliberate creation of something different and distinctive or a conformity to the norm of the era. Tone is a bit different. A writer like John Updike could alter tone (and style) to fit the supposed persona. It is easy to identify the style of some writers but harder with those who are more like chameleons in their approach.

[Eiseabhal]

When I say identify I mean to work out from an unseen unascribed extract.

[ennison]

Why don't you post an unidentified text Eiseabhal - to test your hypo- thesis?

[EmptySeraph]

No-one mentioning Susan Sontag? Ok...

[Danik 2016]

Two great Brazilian 20th century writers: Clarice Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa.

Clarice Lispector
http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/12/brazil-claire-lispector-second-chance-in-english/
João Guimarães Rosa
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1941913.The_Jaguar_and_Other_Stories