Favorite Authors of All Time (Based Off Writing Skills)

[Jukka]

Guy De Maupassant, Franz Kafka, Gogol, Alexandra Dumas senior, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoi.. It basically depends a lot if you get to read in original language or not.

[Mayor]

I would have to go with Shakespeare, Proust, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, Gide, whoever wrote John 1, Hugo. I can't imagine this list without David Foster Wallace and Cormac McCarthy. N=1 but hard to read Rushdie without thinking his IQ is about 400. Non-fiction would be Tuchman.

[Aaron]

Chrichton, for style? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a mensch and I love the cut of his jib, but in terms of style. . .what style?

Chrichton to me is an investigative mind who absorbs reams of certain captivating sectors of knowledge and builds fictitious stories around them for our pleasure and education.

Am I wrong?

[Mayor]

I agree Aaron, Crichton is like Grisham like so many writers of fiction, true crime, etc. these days. Good at assembling information and finding the story within the information but I don't think he's a master with words or anything. I think people like him are good storytellers, good with organizing data. Michael Lewis (Moneyball) is another example, good at sorting through data to find trends and the story, but I don't think he's a literary light or anything in that sense. Often he trips on himself when he's trying too hard to prove himself. Malcolm Gladwell another -- finds little tidbits and organizes them together in ways that are interesting but not always credible or meaningful. I saw him give a lecture recently in person -- he's more of an entertainer than anything. There's not a lot of soul in his work, in my opinion, and he's sort of a mass consumer of culture and organizer and reducer rather than a skilled artisan or philosopher or poet. Bill Simmons who writes for espn and Grantland is another good example -- picks interesting topics and such and has a relationship with the people but his actual writing skill is easily achievable by any ambitious 12th grader. On the other hand, Wes Morris who writes a lot of movie reviews for Grantland has a real mastery of words and would be impossible to imitate.

[Aaron]

Yeah, and it works the other way around too. That is to say, there are authors who are artists with the phrase, but sometimes miss the mark in terms of content or do not have a good sense of the reader. The latter books in Maya Angelou's Caged Bird series come to mind as an example.

[Audrey]

Jane Austen- Charles Dickens-Leo Tolstoy-Edgar Allan Poe-Scott Fitzgerald-Virginia Woolf- George Orwell.

[Aaron]

That's more like it.

[Kelsi]

For me it would be Jane Austen and Stephen King. There are others but at the top of my head I would have to say these two.

[kellyjane]

From the top of my head, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Sue Monk Kidd, Pat Conroy, Louis de Bernières, Sara Gruen.

[Linda]

Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Shakespeare. Modern writers - Lindsey Kelk, Catherine Alliot and Jill Mansell.

[Beatriz]

Chekhov

[Anthony]

Oscar Wilde
Emily Bronte
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
Alexandre Dumas
Peter Watt
Arthur Conan Doyle
Patrick White
Nathaniel Hawthorne

[Cynthia]

If you exclude the masters and focus on contemporary writers I'd pick Barbara Kingsolver. The first hundred words of The Poisonwood Bible put her in a class by herself.

[Monique]

Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe, Hugo, Chelsea Cain, Isabel Allende, Anne Rice, and Christopher Moore.

(Moore makes me laugh so hard that I cry!)

[Florin]

Probably has the most mentions on this thread, but Gabo Marquez for me.

Aside from that, Fitzgerald, Kundera, Nabokov (only read Lolita), Ishiguro.

[[deleted user]]

I don't know yet

[Baz]

There are many I could name, and a few already have been by others, but because she hasn't been mentioned yet I'll chime in with Alice Munro.