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My favourite writer would definitely be J.K.Rowling. She has her faults to be sure, but i cannot help losing myself for hours immersed in the Harry Potter realms. Stephen Kking criticized her work saying that she used many expressions in how her charactours talked, expressions that were not supposed to be used in the way she used them. 'he spoke angrily' for example. you do not speak angrily, you speak in an angry tone. But i am a big fan of J.K.Rowling.
Is it allowed to pronounce such names as J.K. Rowling and Stephen King at a literature website?? :-? :evil: These authors stand in the same relation to literature as Spice Girls do!
The question was who's your favorite writer, Arteum, not which writer will you claim to like in order to impress others. Give them a break, please.
My dearest Arteum!
It was not fair for you to take a go at me so. The topic was merely what my favourite authour was. Must i be persecuted for telling the truth?! It is not for you to judge Mrs. Rowling or Stephen King. When Mr. King's books have made many a classic movie and Mrs.Rowling's books fly off the shelves faster than the people can stock them. I believe you owe me an apology. Why must you be such an ***?
-Phoen-X-
For sheer entertainment value I have to go with Douglas Adams. I didn't find anything really groundbreaking or revolutionary in the Hitchhiker's series but at the same time I couldn't draw myself out of that world until he ended it. So he must have done something right.
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell for chilling portraits of the future, which appear to be ringing more true as time goes by.
Mark Twain for taking on the social ills of his time in a light hearted manner that makes for good reading today.
And F. Scott Fitzgerald for teaching me that revision is the most effective route to excellent storytelling.
Mark Twain
J. R. R. Tolkien
Dave Barry
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Edgar Alan Poe
H. P. Lovecraft
Robert E. Howard
for poetry
Emily Dickinson
Odgen Nash
Many may think me strange. I'm used to it. Dragon out. :)
For novelists:
Jane Austen
The Brontes
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Thomas Hardy
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Tolkien
Ray Bradbury
For poets:
Longfellow
Christina Rossetti
Lord Byron
Thomas Hardy
Tennyson
Best story-teller:
Washington Irving :)
not in order
Dickens
Lao Tse
Huxley
Doyle
Guy. De Maupassant
D.Quinn
A.Dumas
Oscar Wilde
Arthur Rimbaud
Sylvia Plath
Jean-Paul Sartre
Shakespeare
George Orwell
Friedrich Nietzcshe
Virginia Woolf
Anne Sexton
Charles Dickens
Jamse Joyce
Virginia Woolf
Thomas Hardy
Allan Folson
Hemingway
Poetry:
Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Literature:
Hemingway
Emily Bronte
Harper Lee
J.D. Salinger
F. Scott Fitzgerald
C.S Lewis (don't know if he qualifies as lit, but a favorite for sure)
You know, I'd like to think that my favorite writer has not yet been discovered. That someday i'll pick up a book by someone I've never read before or have read very little of before, and be blown away. Days like that are great. A friend recommended "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway and I'd never read his stuff before (only short stories), opened a whole new world for me...SO...who knows? Hopefully my list will evolve over time...
Poetry:
John Milton
Percy B. Shelley
John Keats
Lord Byron
William Shakespeare
William Wordsworth
Y.B Yeats
Fernando Pessoa
Camilo Pessanha
Emily Dickinson
Novelist:
Thomas Hardy
D.H Lawrence
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Melville
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Eça de Queirós
Leo Tolstoy
Drama
William Shakespeare
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Marlowe
Henrik Ibson
Oscar Wilde
Seneca
Jane Austen
Brontes
Alcott
Tolkien
there are more I just cannot think right now
and when I was younger Laura Ingalls Wilder
and my guilty pleasure
Stephen King
So many cool people ... Pequod, you must like Melville! So many Orwell fans, and that is cool, but I don't see him as the most important of the 20th CENT. Hemingway? Faulkner? Fitzgerald? Orwell gave us double speak but he did not change the structure of the language as Hemingway and Faulkner did. And Fitzgerald... no one should learn to drive a car before first passing physics class AND THEN reading Gatsby.
send some love,
burnsie
Laurence Sterne
Par Lagerkvist
Hermann Hesse
William Faulkner
Joseph Heller
Jonathan Titchenal (google it)
Samuel Beckett
Many to come.
Margaret Mitchell
Jane Austen
Charlotte Bronte
(But, of course, this list will constantly be revised and added to) :)
Emily Bronte
Oscar Wilde
Ovid
Friedrich Nietzsche
Choderlos de Laclos
Jane Austen
Friedrich Schiller
Samuel Richardson
Jean Paul Sartre
Shakespeare
Edgar Allan Poe
.........hope the list will be continued
I think I have avoided this thread for long enough, because even trying to think of a favorite writer, or narrowing them down to five, even, sounds difficult, but . . . here goes, and no one has to actually read this:
In fiction: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Honoré de Balzac, Washington Irving, Giovanni Boccaccio, Edgar Allan Poe, Zora Neale Hurston, J.D. Salinger, and Harper Lee.
In non-fiction/philosophy: Immanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Leonard Shlain, Dwight Goddard, Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Dag Hammarskjöld, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, George Berkeley, Carl Jung, Cicero, Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, James Carse, Robert Anton Wilson, and Lucretius.
In drama: William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Miller, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Marlowe, Tennessee Williams, Heinrich von Kleist, and Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere.
In poetry: Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, Elizabeth-Barrett Browning, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dante Alighierhi, Petrarch, Jalaluddin Rumi, D.H. Lawrence, William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, William Stafford, Lord George Gordon Byron, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Sappho, Ben Jonson, Pablo Neruda, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sharon Olds, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Theodore Roethke, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.
I have alot of reading to do...but personal faveorites used to be J.D. Salinger and H.P. Lovecraft a couple of years ago. At the moment, my faveorite writer is Thomas Mann.... and how come no one has mention Kipling, OR Agatha Christie (mothers faveorite)
Novelists
Zadie Smith
Evelyn Waugh
Kingsley Amis
EM Forster
Jane Austen
Sebastien Japrisot
Poets
Christina Rosetti
Wilfred Owen
Seamus Heaney
Drama
Shakespeare (you have to put that....but he is simply genius)
My ultimate favourite (the one who completely changed the way I look at/approach/analyse/write literature) is Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children is just brilliant, though I admit some of his other works are well below this standard
Novelists so far I've liked. I have yet to read others. :)
Ray Bradbury
Richard Bach
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Harper Lee
Poetists
Pablo Neruda
E. E. Cummings
Eco, Eco, Eco, Eco. The rest is Eco... :D
My favourite writers are:
Katherine Paterson
JK Rowling
Emily Bronte
Charlotte Bronte
Jane Austen
George Eliot
Betty Smith
Edgar Allen Poe
Dramatist: Ibsen, Tennessee Williams & GB Shaw
Poet:Rabindranath Tagore, William Wordsworth,Emily Dickinson, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and many more.
Fiction writers:Helen Dunmore,R.K.Narayan,Charlotte Bronte,Jhumpa Lahiri and many more...
It's a long list actually!
Vidyanjali
Hemingway, Tolstoy, Miller, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, Melville, Cronin, and, and, and...... Dang it, I'll post again when I can narrow it down to merely a handful. Don't hold your breath on that happening anytime soon though.
Am currently reading Measure for Measure. As I have only reached scene 4, I don't want to jump in to conclusion that I like Shakespeare (I never "liked" his works other than the sonnets). Yet, I found this play quite amusing. So I suppose I'll wait till I finish and then I'll decide whether it'll be my first and last play, or I'll be tempted to read other plays.
oh, I forgot Charles Dickens. He is also one of my favourites.
Dostoevsky and Hemingway, yes.. , and Pramoedya Ananta Toer
I'm going to sidestep your question a bit and tell you the funniest writer I ever read.
It used to be Hunter S. Thompson until I read "The Ginger Man," a novel by J. P. Donleavy (who not coincidentally happened to be Thompson's favorite writer.)
"The Ginger Man" is insanely hilarious. While reading it, I laughed so hard I got a stomach ache. It's about an American married to a young British woman and going to college in Ireland. The plot is a strange combination of the mundane and the bizarre: drunken pub crawls and private parties, the reek of body odor because no one seems to own a bath tub, dodging landlords due to lack of rent money, sodomistic infidelity with campus girls, twisted Irish humor about bestiality and incest, etc.
Oddly enough, "The Ginger Man" made the list of the 100 most important novels published in the 20th century.
Mikhail Artsybashev-Sanin, Nietzsche, Dante, Donne, Gaiman, and of course- Dahl :D
Anne Rice. Without a doubt, she's my all time favorite!
Well... I've only recently renewed my fervor for literature.
what a feeling.
It seems like I fall for every writer that comes my way. Even if the novel isn't particularly good as a whole, there always seems to be some great germs in it someplace.
Right now, for me, it's Hemmingway.
I like Faulkner too.
Hemmingways style is neat.
I've not heard much of anyone mention hemmingway on this board yet.
How do you feel about Hemmingway?
Georgette Heyer, Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time series), Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Trudi Canavan, Terry Pratchett.
And a big round of applause for all the people who said steven king or JK Rowling! This is a literature forum, not just for 'classics'.
It's PC party line today to knock Hemingway as an over-rated writer, mean drunk and wife abuser, but I still enjoy his writing. I started reading Hemingway when I was a teenager and I loved his concise style and snappy dialogue. He definitely had his limits as a writer, but he worked very hard to become a craftsman of modern fiction. And he strongly influenced a whole generation of American writers more than Faulkner or Steinbeck.Quote:
Originally Posted by A Hard Rain
I think the novel of purest Hemingway is "The Old Man and the Sea." He wrote it at age 54 after most critics thought he was burned out as a writer. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, which helped to propel Hemingway to the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Because he wrote so much about war, Hemingway has been unfairly criticized as a warmonger. But no warmonger would write this: "In modern war you will die like a dog for no good reason."
Like many authors, Hemingway had two distinct identities. One was the public personna he invented to keep the world at arm's length: macho big-game hunter, deep-sea fisherman, soldier of fortune, etc. The other was a rather sensitive introverted man given to philosophical reflection. Real macho men don't sit alone for hours every day and dream up fictional characters to write about.
Pre-1923
Charlotte Bronte
Charles Dickens
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Arthur Conan Doyle
Alexandre Dumas
George Eliot
Herman Melville
Leo Tolstoy
Post
William Faulkner
William Golding
Joseph Heller
Guy Gavriel Kay
Daniel Keyes
George R.R. Martin
James A. Michener
James Jones
Philip Roth
John Steinbeck
Neal Stephenson
John Updike
Connie Willis
Let's see who I can think of:
Carol Shields
Madeleine L'Engle
Anita Shreve
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Lilian Jackson Braun
Tolkien
Barbara Gowdy
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Adams
James Rollins
James Fray
Wally Lamb
Judy Blume
Nicholas Sparks
C.S. Lewis
Sue Miller
There are others, but it is too early for me to remember everything. Those are just the authors that I have read recently and enjoyed.
Which Lewis?Quote:
Originally Posted by alatar
starrwriter-- thats interesting. Thank you for the input. Yeah, like there is certain things that hemmingway does with his style that blows me away. Other times i'm like man maybe he didn't even do that on purpose. But, he had to of. It is just a little perplexing. And he does seem to have a certain stigma like you mentioned. I did not know much about him but i just finished his a fairwell to arms. I knew about his lodge in Idaho, the alcohol, and the rifle.
Whatever you say, he was beautiful. And i agree that the old man and the sea may be his most minimalistic, true to his style piece.
'Up the road, in his shack,the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.'
It is hard at times, the blood and sweat, the aching pains that we go through. Hemmingway just seems so full of life when I look back at him though. Being young and in Europe. The war and the culture.
His short stories and sketches are what first caught my attention.
Like this one:
Chapter V
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.
That last part was difficult for me to swallow after I discovered it was true. Maugham died a nihilist. I wonder how he could have written such a spiritually uplifting novel as "The Razor's Edge" if he believed in nothing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Arteum
But I still enjoy his short stories. They are effortless to read and always fascinating. I rank Maugham among the best short story writers with de Maupassant, Hemingway and Salinger.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Friedrich Nietzsche...