Best prose stylists in English literature?

I would include Hemingway on the list of great stylists, but I wouldn't put him at the top. There two problems I have with his style: First, I like prose to sound good when read aloud, and his usually doesn't - he doesn't seem to have much sense of rhythm. Second, he sometimes deteriorates into self-parody. It's no wonder there are "bad Hemingway" contests. I remember a passage from the beginning of "Green Hills of Africa" that I can't quote exactly, but in my memory it went something like this: "We went up the hill and across and down into the valley and along the river and up again and then down and across and up and along and then down and through and across and along and up again and down and up and down ..."

Sheesh.

:)

Joyce has got to be up there. Easily one of the best descriptive writers. But he's already been discussed.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Orwell. Line after line, the man delivers. Knows how to get right to the point and making the most of your attention.

As far as wit goes, I like Vonnegut. His simple, crisp writing never gets dull and always knows how to put everything in perspective. Wilde, too, is easily one of the most quotable.

Hemingway's iceberg method is also something to consider. His minimalist take that "takes you to the bridge and lets you walk over it" is a bit demanding, but well worth it. Not one more word needs to be in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" or "Hills Like White Elephants" to portray the story. Also has some of the most memorable passages from what I've read.

I'm also a fan of Pynchon's, Salinger's, and Kerouac's styles too, though the others write better.

I skimmed the whole thread and didn't find a definition of "prose stylist", so I don't think that the responses were anything beyond preferences in writers of prose, which isn't an especially enlightening piece of information.

I can understand why there were several responses of Nabokov, and he was a damned good writer. The same is true of Joyce; although clarity was not one of his stronfpoints, and clarity is of high valuse in prose. My preference would be for someone who used the style to convey information. Most writers don't do much of that, and many would question whether it was possible, but H. P. Lovecraft created atmosphere and assisted in characterizations through his style. There are a few others who have done the same, such as Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, but most writers are lucky to get clarity.

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.

Borges postulated something of a cyclical nature to literature (or art in general) suggesting that dynamic new movements in art eventually erode into a sort of Mannerism (although Borges used the term "Baroque") and that all Mannered or "Baroque" art was by it very nature ironic... satirical... comic. Borges himself is surely not far removed from a writer like Swift or Sterne.

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Originally Posted by Alexander III

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.

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you're a genius.

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

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

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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

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Originally Posted by Themistocles18

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Themistocles18

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

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A good description.

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

Stephen King, of course!

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.

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).

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Originally Posted by Smooth Operator

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

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

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner.

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."

kerouac any day of the week

kerouac any day of the week

Accck!!:shocked::eek2:

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

kerouac any day of the week

Accck!!:shocked::eek2:

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

amy tan

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

Isn't prose supposed to be 'prosa,' meaning straight-forward?

It's a point, Miyako-sama.

Yet since the later-19th Century many writers have experimented with stylized prose frequently termed 'prose-poetry'.

this is my idea of a good prose -- not too poetic and not too bland.

from God of Small Things by Arundathi Roy

"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun."

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Originally Posted by miyako73

Isn't prose supposed to be 'prosa,' meaning straight-forward?

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Yes, prose is supposed to be straigh forward prose. There are some bad writers who toss in purple and poetry, but that is bad prose. Good prose is straight-forward, clear, and concise.

Yes, prose is supposed to be straigh forward prose. There are some bad writers who toss in purple and poetry, but that is bad prose. Good prose is straight-forward, clear, and concise.

Clear... to the point... written at an 8th grade... oh, hell, let's make it a 4th grade level so that anyone can understand it... doesn't challenge the reader in any way... not all that interesting... rather akin to a dictionary definition... that is what "good prose" SHOULD be? According to who? Or are you now the arbiter of what all prose is "supposed" to be like?

Funny enough... Clear, straight foward, concise... Like Flaubert, the guy who did it because Prose needed to be like poetry?

In 65 replies from soi-disant lovers of literature on English prose stylists and only a fleeting and scarcely complimentary mention of George Orwell. "Politics and The English Language", "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" are masterclasses of English prose and should be required reading for any aspiring writer. So many of the people held up for our admiration here are mannered...Kerouac for example or one trick ponies, Hemingway's a good example.

Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter, Conrad, Cormac McCarthy:

"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."
--Cormac McCarthy, *Blood Meridian*

And here is Conrad, from "Youth":
"I pulled back, made fast again to the jetty, and then went to sleep at last. I had faced the silence of the East. I had heard some of its languages. But when I opened my eyes again the silence was as complete as though it had never been broken. I was lying in a flood of light, and the sky had never looked so far, so high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without moving.
"And then I saw the men of the East—they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green foliage, through the big leaves that hung shining and still like leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise. And these were the men. I sat up suddenly. A wave of movement passed through the crowd from end to end, passed along the heads, swayed the bodies, ran along the jetty like a ripple on the water, like a breath of wind on a field—and all was still again. I see it now—the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the wealth of green infinite and varied, the sea blue like the sea of a dream, the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of vivid colour—the water reflecting it all, the curve of the shore, the jetty, the high-sterned outlandish craft floating still, and the three boats with tired men from the West sleeping unconscious of the land and the people and of the violence of sunshine. They slept thrown across the thwarts, curled on bottom-boards, in the careless attitudes of death. The head of the old skipper, leaning back in the stern of the long-boat, had fallen on his breast, and he looked as though he would never wake. Farther out old Mahon's face was upturned to the sky, with the long white beard spread out on his breast, as though he had been shot where he sat at the tiller; and a man, all in a heap in the bows of the boat, slept with both arms embracing the stem-head and with his cheek laid on the gunwale. The East looked at them without a sound.
"I have known its fascination since: I have seen the mysterious shores, the still water, the lands of brown nations, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so many of the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their strength. But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea—and I was young—and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that is left of it! Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour—of youth!... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and—good-bye!—Night—Good-bye...!"

*****

Oscar Wilde

“Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business centre hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently - not fall, not jump - but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off - farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.”

- Vladimir Nabokov ~ Pale Fire

"I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables."

William Gass ~ The Tunnel

I like John Milton's prose writings.

They've already been mentioned but I have to say Oscar Wilde and Joseph Conrad are up there. I do believe though that Ralph Waldo Emerson's prose is the finest ever written in the english language. I get high off his essays.

Evelyn Waugh's prose is breathtakingly beautiful.
P G Wodehouse is also wonderful and has even been compared to Shakespeare. Wodehouse more or less created his own form of English and there is nothing quite like it- as Stephen Fry put it, reading Wodehouse is like "bathing in sunlit perfection".

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Originally Posted by Seasider

In 65 replies from soi-disant lovers of literature on English prose stylists and only a fleeting and scarcely complimentary mention of George Orwell. "Politics and The English Language", "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" are masterclasses of English prose and should be required reading for any aspiring writer. So many of the people held up for our admiration here are mannered...Kerouac for example or one trick ponies, Hemingway's a good example.

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Agreed. Orwell is an absolute pleasure to read.

Looking at the quotes Profgood provided from McCarthy (a writer I enjoy) and Conrad (a writer I admire) I am struck again by what I sometimes feel about McCarthy - that he is flashy because he can be but Conrad integrates his style to the whole task and my admiration grows as I consider how difficult a task it is for most of us to learn another language as we get older and Conrad mastered a form of literary English that is really attractive. Mr Gass has a considerable dark humour.

I agree when it comes to McCarthy and Waught. I would mention also the name of Tolkien, R. Howard, U. LeGuin.

You're not really being very honest about Joyce. Yes, he did write to Jacques Benoist-Mechin that: "I have put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it keeps the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." However, to condense the entirety of Joyce's accomplishments, goals, and successes down to this one statement is very shortsighted. The sheer amount of research and connection-making that he performed in Ulysses is absolutely stunning, not to mention the ability with which he employed his various prose styles. Yes, a book like Ulysses demands a good bit of commitment from the reader, but the payoff that one receives after that work is well worth the effort.

Honestly, if clarity and concision were the only things that we need to look for in successful prose, then dictionaries and encyclopedias would be the most celebrated pieces of prose ever written. Whether we agree to like him or not, Joyce's ability to create incredibly vibrant and clear prose with such fluidity and variation is stunning. There's just no getting around it. The man was absolutely fearless when it came to writing.

Nabokov is pure style. He is like a tennis player that hits the ball between his legs just because he can.