Your favorite writer

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