Literary Stylists

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

No-one mentioning Susan Sontag? Ok...

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

Clarice Lispector
http://publishingperspectives.com/20...ce-in-english/
João Guimarães Rosa
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1..._Other_Stories