who are your 3 favorite authors of all time

[RiteStuff]

any language?

[Dark Muse]

Hard to pick only three but if I had to than I would have to say

Edgar Allan Poe
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Margaret Atwood

The third was hard because there are several I could have chosen for that spot. I was really torn and thought I ought to have a woman on there because I do love her work.

[Diggory Venn]

Thomas Hardy
Robert Louis Stevenson
Charlotte Bronte joint third with Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and Arthur Conan Doyle ( ha ha, got a sneaky six in there !)

[Carmilla]

Hello!

Shakespeare
George ELiot
Robert Louis Stevenson

[kev67]

George MacDonald Fraser
George Orwell
David Lodge

[ajvenigalla]

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Cormac McCarthy
Flannery O'Connor

These are just the three I can think of right now

[stlukesguild]

William Shakespeare
Dante Alighieri
Tie: William Blake & J.L. Borges

[ajvenigalla]

Favorite American authors, stlukesguild?

[stlukesguild]

Favorite American Authors:
-Walt Whitman
-R.W. Emerson
-Herman Melville
runners up:
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
-Emily Dickinson
-T.S. Eliot
-Vladimir Nabokov

Favorite British Authors:
-William Shakespeare
-Edmund Spenser
-William Blake
runners up:
-John Milton
-John Keats
-Lawrence Sterne
-Jonathan Swift
-Thomas Traherne
-Robert Herrick
-Oscar Wilde
-Lewis Carroll

Favorite French Authors:
-Charles Baudelaire
-Victor Hugo
-Michel de Montaigne
runners up:
-Gustave Flaubert
-Paul Verlaine
-Marcel Proust

Favorite German Authors:
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-Hermann Hesse
-Ranier Maria Rilke
runners up:
-Thomas Mann
-Franz Kafka
-Friedrich Hölderlin

Favorite Italian Authors:
-Dante Alighieri
-Eugenio Montale
-Italo Calvino
runners up:
-Giacomo Leopardi
-Carlo Goldini
-Ludovico Ariosto

Favorite Spanish Authors:
-Miguel de Cervantes
-Federico Garcia Lorca
-Rafael Alberti
runners up:
-Pedro Calderon de la Barca
-Fernando de Rojas
-San Juan de la Cruz

Favorite Russian Authors:
-Leo Tolstoy
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
-Anton Chekhov
runners up:
-Boris Pasternak
-Nikolai Gogol
-Mikhail Bulgakov

Favorite Greek Authors:
-Homer
-Aeschylus
-Sophocles
-Euripides

Favorite Latin Authors:
-Virgil
-Ovid
-Horace

Favorite Other European Authors:
-Fernando Pessoa
-Henrik Ibsen
-Pär Lagerkvist
-Jaroslaw Siefert
-Czesław Miłosz
-August Strindberg
-Jose Saramago

South-American/Mexican Authors:
-J.L. Borges
-Pablo Neruda
-Octavio Paz
-Gabriel García Márquez
-Alejo Carpentier
-Julio Cortazar
-César Vallejo
-Mario Vargas Llosa

[byquist]

Conrad
George Eliot
W. Shakespeare
plus 4th: Chekhov

[ajvenigalla]

Interesting stlukesguild. Thanks for the list.

How is Victor Hugo better than Flaubert and Proust (all three being great canonical masters)? I'm interested. I love Hugo's Les Miserablee and long to read his other novels and his poetic work soon. :)

[Marcus1]

Yasunari Kawabata
Thomas Mann
Virginia Woolf

[Vota]

Wow, there are so many books I have waiting to be read, that I can only preface this by saying that these are placeholders:

1. Tolstoy
2. George Bernard shaw
3. Shakespeare/Homer

[The Comedian]

For me, number one is perfectly stable in his place at the top spot, the other two may vary. But currently,

1. Henry David Thoreau
2. Euripides
3. W. Somerset Maugham

[M3ll155x]

1. Thomas Pynchon
2. Virginia Woolf/Vladimir Nabokov
3. William Shakespeare/William Faulkner

Picking only three was physically painful; even breaking the rules and including five was gut-wrenching

[Jackson Richardson]

Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
dunno

[Scheherazade]

Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
dunnoThomas Hardy? ;)

For me...

Faulkner
Greene
Fitzgerald

I will also throw in Henry James a bonus! :D

[Dipen Guha]

1. William Shakespeare
2 O. Henry
3 Leo Tolstoy

[Helga]

William Shakespeare
Sjón
Milan Kundera

[MANICHAEAN]

Richard Compton.
Ian Fleming.
John Le Carre.
William Manchester.
Grahame Greene.
Evelyn Waugh

[mortalterror]

Hemingway, Shakespeare, Ovid

[Narkissos]

1. William Shakespeare.
2. Vladimir Nabokov.
3. James Joyce.

Their work exudes je ne sais quoi. Nothing compares. Well, arguably Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

[WICKES]

1. Evelyn Waugh
2. Aldous Huxley
3. Anthony Burgess

[Catherine.L]

hmmm

1. Dostoyevsky

2. Albert Camus

3. jean paul sartre

Can I say three more??

[Seph Thompson]

Modern (my holy literary trinity): Timothy Findley, Vikram Seth, Yann Martel
Classic: E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte

[mtpspur]

1. Rafael Sabatini
2. Sir Henry Rider Haggard
3. Adam Hall (Quiller series)