>1. Shakespeare
>2. Melville
>3. Updike
>4. Nabakov
>5. Faulkner
>6. Joyce
>7. James
>8. Vonnegut
>9. Hemingway
>10. Salinger
Top Ten English Language Prose Stylists
>1. Shakespeare
>2. Melville
>3. Updike
>4. Nabakov
>5. Faulkner
>6. Joyce
>7. James
>8. Vonnegut
>9. Hemingway
>10. Salinger
Frogposters deserve to be rangebanned and used as a target during Mozambique drills
you must be fun at parties...
breasts and timestamp!
>gayner
>t. ESL sp*c
Hispanics love Faulkner. Faulkner hate is due to Europoors who can’t even picture the landscape in his novels
Are you referencing my thread from around two weeks ago where I (jokingly) asked if the characters in The Sound and the Fury are cowboys? Faulkner is one of my favourite authors, but no, he isn't particularly recognised in Europe. Same goes for Melville, Whitman, authors who speak to a certain American idealism.
I will say, however, that Faulkner's prose tends to obfuscate the visual properties of his settings, because he's so focused on internalised thoughts and feelings. We tend to see America in block categories - wild west, suburbia, big city - and Yoknapatawpha doesn't really slot into those.
>Wagner
>prose
>Shakespeare
Kek OP confirmed moron.
His corpus of plays includes some fine prose, though he is nevertheless an odd choice.
Harold Bloom also considered Shakespeare's prose to be the best of all European languages
>I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and queene: moult no feather. I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so. (Hamlet)
OP ought to conduct a wider search after beauty in prose, for Andrewes, Burton, Browne, Locke, Taylor all lie waiting.
Sounds like it was written by a pissy dweeb (post and passage)
Shakespeare's legacy status after this post: utterly and irremediably destroyed.
In the real world, he’s as great as ever.
Anon, didn't you read the post? He's a "pissy dweeb" now, that guy said so. It's like you don't even keep up with the latest advancements in the field of literary criticism.
>dunked on by anon on lit
>compared to Shakespeare
You forgot Anderson, Hardy, and Lawrence
Lawrence definitely. A Bible-like simplicity in a lot of his fiction, all the repetition, all the consecutive sentences starting 'And'.
There's a random, unassuming line from Brideshead Revisited that's stuck with me just because it has mysterious kind of simple beauty:
>From where I stood the house was hidden by a green spur, but I knew well how and where it lay, couched among the lime trees like a hind in the bracken.
For anyone who likes nice unpretentious English prose, I would recommend the essays of Max Beerbohm.
Waugh
>prose
>shakespeare
the absolute state of IQfy
>Eduard Gibbon.
>Edmund Burke
i concur
It’s Nabokov.
The only sensible answer.
Other writers have beautiful passages or lines, but it feels like every word in Nabokov's work is perfectly and intentionally chosen.
He tries too hard sometimes. The kind of homosexual who uses utilize instead of use.
I utilized your mother last night.
I used her right before you. I hope you enjoyed the taste of my cum, homosexual.
Nabokov is too stuck up pretentious to be counted among the best. A great style should be sincere. Proust in translation is a greater style because it is both sincere and does what Nabokov's style does.
Agree
When it comes purely to the english language, it feels odd to rate Nabokov so highly when his english wasn't perfect and he got a ton of help from his editor. His prose was still fantastic, of course, but it's halfway there between being a translation.
>>3. Updike
>>8. Vonnegut
>>10. Salinger
nice bait homosexual. also, frick you
James is a terrible prose stylist. There are at least 50 better ones.
>8. Vonnegut
>9. Hemingway
>10. Salinger
Nice troll
For me: Hazlitt, Addison, Browne, Pater and Orwell in essays, Joyce, Woolf and Austen in novels, Pope in letters, Hume in philosophy..
Def Browne and Hazlitt
>no Henry Green
You're not well-read.
The Fault in Our Stars was a masterpiece xD homosexual
Maybe I’m falling for bait but John and Henry are very different
Lol
Is he that good? Makes me excited to get around to reading him.
>Why were his titles so dull?
He was English.
>Waugh
I've only read Sword of Honor (the trilogy, not just the first book), at first I thought it was a bit pointless and obnoxious, I had to gain a much better understanding of both the English spirit and the divide between tradition and modernity before it really came together for me. I still find him perhaps excessively petty and b***hy but now I can properly contextualize how a lot of the seemingly disparate and unimportant concerns relate to the main theme.
Why were his titles so dull? What am I supposed to read by him?
You should start with Loving by Henry Green. It's very good, well-written, and funny. Start there. If you want to see how good of a prose stylist he is, then read Living. It's written entirely in a working class dialect (even narration) down to specifics like dropping articles such as "a", "an", "the", etc. Yet, it's still extremely readable, and a moving novel.
I found all his novels to be very moving, and they capture these perfect pockets of humanity. He's very much underrated.
Faulkner not being number one renders the entire thing idiotic.
Faulkner's prose is mediocre
No, he's a master prose writer
Hell no he isn't. He is the most polarizing name on the list and there's Vonnegut and Salinger on the list.
>He is the most polarizing name on the list
Literally just another Black person and (You) complained ITT. Faulkner is great.
>Faulkner is great
Not for his clumsy prose.
Faulkner masters both the technical and human aspects. He's a well rounded writer.
But a clumsy prose writer. There is no justification for 4-5 clustered adjectives after the main clause.
If you're a cherrypicking homosexual then no one is a good prose stylist lmao I think Borges was right about Faulkner.
>cherrypicking
That's literally the most obvious attribute of his prose. Just how unjustifiably stuffed it is with adjectives and adjective clauses. Especially Absalom, Absalom! Want me to post?
Great stuff in that image, very similar to things I've thought about in trying to understand why so many authors (all the more so as the 20th century went on) leave me with a feeling of incompleteness. I wonder if we'll ever recover that balance.
In some sense, but this is an oversimplification, given that ancient concepts of rhetorical style were highly developed. But yeah it didn't really apply to fiction since most works of prose fiction were popular romances.
Fun list, I like it.
Faulkner once described his books as trying to fit the entire world on a pinhead. He said the only writer he knew who did that just as well as him was Thomas Wolfe. I have to agree with Faulkner. Wolfe's first two novels are astounding and they certainly do try to fit the entire world on a pinhead.
dude just ran with stream-of-consciousness memery when it was still hot and new. his actual prose is dull
Henry Miller
I've only read sections from Tropic of Cancer but man, I really liked them. I don't know why he's compared to Kerouac and Bukowski and all those hacks who came later
He was the best one to do the short sentence with obscure words, ephemeral depraved memoir style. Everyone after him was trying too hard. H.S. Thompson gets a pass because he’s actually funny as well.
Why is Waugh's English so weird? I have read Dickens, Salinger, Nabokov, Pynchon, etc but Waugh's language just isn't clicking. And yes, I'm not Bri'ish.
No Poe? Read moar.
Without putting a ton of thought in it, these are a bunch in no particular order. What I consider a good prose stylist is one who has a distinctive signature style that is easily recognizable from reading a paragraph or two
Hemingway
Faulkner
Melville
Lawrence
Stein
Miller
Dickens
Joyce
McCarthy
Sterne
Beckett
Conrad
Salinger
Fitzgerald
Nabakov
Woolf
James
Emerson
>What I consider a good prose stylist is one who has a distinctive signature style that is easily recognizable from reading a paragraph or two
So like F Gardner too, by this logic.
>Beckett
>English prose stylist
Good joke.
Good point but he did translate some of his own work if I’m not mistaken.
But Gardner isn’t good.
good prose stylist = one who has a distinctive signature style that is easily recognizable from reading a paragraph or two
Incredibly incorrect
That's what you said. See
That wasn’t me. A top 10 prose writer has to have good prose. That’s the topic of the thread. Out of the good prose writers, ones with a signature style that is recognizable will be ranked higher
James doesn't have good prose so he shouldn't even be on the list.
That’s an opinion. Personally I think this thread is largely moronic because it’s all opinion. What makes one writer good at prose and another bad? This board is into the literary classics. All of them are good writers. Maybe someone like de Sade who is known more for his content is an exception. This thread is just a different version of who are your favorite writers
>All of them are good writers.
The topic is good prose stylists, not just good writers. James is not a good prose stylist.
Prose is writing. Discussing prose is the emptiest discussion most of the time.
>Discussing prose is the emptiest discussion most of the time.
Then this thread isnt for you.
Say something meaningful then
By your logic the only guys on your list who qualify are:
Hemingway
Stein
Joyce
McCarthy
James
And maybe Faulkner. Rest can't be recognized purely from a paragraph or two, without resorting to plot or form of the novel.
If i posted an excerpt from each I’d bet you could match them up if you’ve read them
To be a "stylist" is distinctly a modernist idea. Shit conception of a shit list. also shakespeare wasnt exactly known for his prose, lad
>only one is actually english
Midwits above this line
____________
>Alexander Theroux
>William Gass
>John Barth
>Cormac McCarthy (despise his work)
>John Updike
>John Steinbeck
>Truman Capote
>Herman Melville
>Charles Dickens
>G.K. Chesterton
>having Theroux, Gass and Barth even in the list let alone top 3
You're the midwit moron.
Please suggest better masters.
Thomas Browne shits all over that singsongy homosexual Gass. Frick, what a cringe writer he is.
>Thomas Browne
Religio Medici is honestly embarrassing. It's literally just a heretic pretending to be priest smothered in mediocre prose and cronish sentimentality.
I am waiting for a name.
> Religio Medici is honestly embarrassing
Half The Tunnel is embarrassing, also. Especially when he overdoes alliteration and it seems more like Sean Penn’s moronic novel than anything in the European tradition.
The Tunnel is a resplendent work of prose and a garbage work of fiction but to not akcnowledge his pure grasp and, I would say, mastery of English syntax, grammar, and elegant poetic mastery is pure ignorance and basically literary blasphemy.
Here’s a book you will love.
This might be more your speed. Watch out for the blue dog though because that might be above your reading level.
Truly a superior literary achievement than anything Gass the Fat wrote
>admitting to having read Sean Penn's novel
Did you also read Ethan Hawke's novels?
It was a meme here years ago, newbie, and people posted excerpts. Sounded very much like Gass. I believe even one guy posted a bit from The Tunnel in that thread and people shat on it thinking it was from Penn’s book. Funny days.
>newbie
You probably have no idea who Nathan Hill is. Nor did you participate in those threads, so shut the frick up with your newbie spiel, newbie.
Literally pick any semi well known stylist from 19th century. They are sure as hell better than trash like Barth and Gass.
Dickens
>>G.K. Chesterton
What would be some good works by these to get a good example of their writing?
I'm reading Oliver Twist right now, idk if it's literally top tier prose but the descriptive passages are very beautiful.
>any Americans at all
Nice bait.
Hate when people just post the last names like we’re going to know what you’re talking about. My favorite authors are Smith, Johnson, and Brown; I’ll let you figure out which ones.
The only common name in the OP is James. Obviously referring to the terrible writer Henry James
Updike above Faulkner and Joyce has to be the stupidest thing I've read in a while.
Your list if it made sense:
1. Shakespeare
2. Joyce
3. Melville
4. Faulkner
5. Nabokov
(Gap)
6. James
(Massive Gap)
7. Hemingway
8. Updike
9. Vonnegut
10. Salinger
>Shakespeare as a prose writer makes sense
?
All your rankings are clearly arbitrary and misguided. Here's the correct list, consisting of the only seven writers I've ever actually read plus three others I've seen described as 'masterful':
Stephen king
Tom clancy
Hp lovecraft
Ray bradbury
Iain banks
Alan moore
jrr tolkien
Leguinn
Austen
Hardy
Gass is better than all of them
Gass is singsongy bullshit. It’s like that Sean Penn novel but longer and duller
he’s way more practiced and mannered with his writing. I can see why a sap who thinks Faulkner is great would have trouble digesting it
Gass included The Sound and the Fury in his list of 12 most important books of his life. So I guess, Gass was a “sap”, too.
Gass is pretentious bullshit.
>Gass sounds like Sean Penn
Who is this illiterate moron in this thread. Sean Penn tries to be Joyce, and neither sound like Gass. Illiterates arguing about writing lmao
Gass, by his own admission, found it really hard to escape Joyce’s grasp. He was imitating Joyce and tried to fight it.
>imitating Joyce
He writes nothing like Joyce ahahahhaa
In his mind, he did.
That’s fine in his mind. On the page he doesn’t. He’s a million times more modern and intimate and poetic than Joyce ever was
The “poetry” is Sean Penn’s level of craft. Like clueless plastic alliteration believing he’s being innovative. In your mind, he’s better than Joyce. On the page, he was pathetic.
On the page, Joyce was pathetic, Pynchon too. Did you know in the last years of his life Joyce hated himself passionately for the way his career turned after Dubliners? Probably why Gass shits on them.
>Living, alas, among men and their marvels, the city man supposes that his happiness depends on establishing somehow, a special kind of harmonious accord with others. The novelists of the city, of slums and crowds, they call it love—and break their pens.
>Wordsworth feared the accumulation of men in cities. He foresaw their “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation,” and some of their hunger for love. Living in a city, among so many, dwelling in the heat and tumult of incessant movement, a man’s affairs are touch and go—that’s all. It’s not surprising that the novelists of the slums, the cities, and the crowds, should find that sex is but a scratch to ease a tickle, that we’re most human when we’re sitting on the john, and that the justest image of our life is in full passage through the plumbing
Point to the abuse of alliteration. Can I quiz you on some of Gass’s books? I don’t think you’ve read them haha
Facile imagery, flaccid prose, unpoetic at large. Gass was obsessed with Ulysses and tried to fight its influence
> I was flung into a fit of imitation. Like Dante, like Milton, like Proust, like Faulkner, like García Márquez, Joyce is too towering to imitate. It would be years before I could escape his grasp, and I still avoid Ulysses when I am working.
Alliteration in The Tunnel is everywhere, not even worth discussing as you can look them up yourself. Also the moronic puns.
>all I know about Gass is a meme I saw on IQfy once
Just give it up. You’re embarrassing yourself
Fricking moronic. Joyce's prose writes circles around cheap knocoffs like Gass. You're fricking stupid
Gass imitates Beckett more than Joyce. It's clear he never read Beckett in French though.
>It's clear he never read Beckett in French though.
why?
Because Beckett's English translations of the trilogy are written in an English very similar to 16th/17th century English essayists like Addison and Fielding, but with modern diction obviously. Very mannered and eloquent with lots of unknown words. His original French is comparatively much plainer.
When I started reading the Tunnel that's what hit me immediately.
To nitpick, those are both 18th century. And one could quibble with that characterization, I think "very mannered and eloquent" is a pretty reductive/deceptive description of Beckett's English prose. Also you are begging the question as to why his having or not having read Beckett in French is relevant - why is that particular reference point necessary for what Gass was trying to do? I ask not because I care about Gass, but because I get the strong impression that you just wanted to obliquely announce that you *had* read Beckett in French, and such behavior deserves to be named and shamed.
Because of the discrepancy between his English and French styles? Are you dense? Gass appropriates Beckett's English style even though the original French style would be 180 of what Gass was going for. I just pointed that out, idk why you are looking for malice in my observation. You probably need to go outside.
>the original French style would be 180 of what Gass was going for
And why that should have stopped him from imitating the English style, if that was the sort of style he wanted? Beckett's motives for writing in French were fairly eccentric, if Gass didn't have those same motives then there's not necessarily any reason for him to pay any attention to the French style. Just seems like a bit of a non sequitur, not looking for malice but given where we are it's not a bad bet.
Beckett is pretty great though, if anything he's the one who should be in the discussion about greatest prose stylists. I don't mind Gass from what little I've read but I find it hard to believe he's in the same league as Beckett, outside of Joyce and Nabokov there aren't many who are.
Beckett wrote in French because his English style was too imitative of Joyce. And Gass is a better English stylist than Beckett, who is overrated.
Beckett is underrated these days. A genius far beyond an academic fraud like Gass.
He is perfectly rated. A famed playwright who did prose also sometimes.
Ok, if you would like to present your reasoning that would be great. If not I will go on rating Beckett extremely highly. No shame in imitating Joyce, he is the universally acknowledged master, and that imitation is greatly attenuated and mutated into something new by the fact of Beckett's having a totally different ethos/aim.
Highly spurious "argument". Nabokov's first language was Russian and he's still a top-tier English prosifier. Please just refer to the text if you want your points to be taken seriously.
Christine, is that you??
Quoted the wrong guy I guess but English being his 2nd tongue isn't compensation enough to be regarded as a Great English stylist. What are the best qualities of Nabokov's prose? I doubt anyone would refer to his overly aristocratic and pretentious narrators in answering that question. The tone in his inflection marks even his best bits with the phoniness of his deranged narrators. I have Luzhin defense open somewhere around the midway point and I believe this is how he writes when not writing in a manner typical to his orginal English works. The prose doesn't stand out much.
Phony or not, I was merely using it as an example and referring to technical ability, not necessarily taste.
Shut the frick up about Sean Penn
It’s the only thing he knows about Gass. Some meme
>no Kipling
dropped
>ctrl f hawthorne
>0 results
This board, man.
My favorite, and I believe the most under-rated, prose stylist is PG Wodehouse. If he had wrote dark psychologies about the human condition, he would be celebrated as one of the best. But, he wrote very light comedies instead.