Best prose stylists in English literature?

Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote.

Jonathan Swift? Jonathan Swift!

Cormac McCarthy, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, Flannery O'Connor, Jonathan Swift, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, Edgar Allan Poe, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Lydia Davis, Alice Munro, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Tim O'Brien, Kazuo Ishiguro, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Harold Bloom, Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee

I prefer a clear and simple style of prose, I find it more beautiful and satisfying than fanciful stuff - and rarer. So Hemingway and Isherwood good. Henry James bad.

Some folk like their grapes off the vine; some prefer them peeled stuffed and simmered in wine

Ultimately this comes down to personal preference and is necessarily subjective. One would have to be very widely read to arrive at a satisfactory answer to the question, but, in any case, it wouldn't be definitive. However, we all have our preferences based on our reading experience and my preference is for le mot juste rather than the superfluous. Much of my reading has been in French and German at the expense of English so that my knowledge of English prose writing is somewhat limited and, to my mind, Emile Zola and Thomas Mann are equal to anything I have read in English but I would agree that Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene are masterly in their prose style, as are Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald whose compatriot Frank Norris is also a master prose stylist.

I concur with many of the previous suggestions, especially those regarding highly of Joyce (and even Hemingway- images from The Old Man and the Sea have been etched into my mind since Junior High.) Say what you will about Joyce, the controversy surrounding him on this forum is telling. I am astonished to read of no David Foster Wallace recommendations. DFW was the defining prose stylist of recent generations. He is THE GUY contemporary writers look to. An example from Forever Overhead:

"Around the deck of this old public pool on the western edge of Tucson is a Cyclone fence the color of pewter, decorated with a bright tangle of locked bicycles. Beyond this a hot black parking lot full of white lines and glittering cars. A dull field of dry grass and hard weeds, old dandelions’ downy heads exploding and snowing up in a rising wind. And past all this, reddened by a round slow September sun, are mountains, jagged, their tops’ sharp angles darkening into definition against a deep red tired light. Against the red their sharp connected tops form a spiked line, an EKG of the dying day.

The clouds are taking of color by the rim of the sky. The water is spangles of soft blue, five-o’clock warm, and the pool’s smell, like the other smell, connects with a chemical haze inside you, an interior dimness that bends light to its own ends, softens the difference between what leaves off and what begins"

^ thanks bro for the DFW recommendation,

I especially love his "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky," which is IMO one of the greatest literary criticisms ever

To anyone interested in this subject I would strongly recommend seeking out 'A History of English Prose Rhythm' by George Saintsbury.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/441228

Something I just wanted to put out here