Greatest writers of all time

Fucking idiot I don't care if it's bait

I know. That's my point. It made me realize I was a goddamn idiot

No one thinks that in fact the poetic medium is obviously greater pound for pound. Most on Veeky Forums don't read poetry, and that is the most powerful pleb filter.

Try reading Joyce. Even a smart person will feel humbled by Ulysses.

You have shit taste. Hemingway is middle brow for a reason.

The best writers (Melville, Shakespeare) are prose poets

I actually had to read "Portrait of The Artist" for school. Thought the concept was interesting and some parts were beautiful, but I think ~95% of it went over my head.

>taste influences the best

See this is worst of all, thinking your favorite dead writers are better. If you think Hemingway being a writing elite is a matter of opinion you're just a toothless scrub.

I tried to jump into Ulysses and I loved it just for his diction and flow, but it's CRAZY the fucking depth he goes. He spent 7 years making a puzzle of a book only outmatched by the 20 years he spent on Finnegans Wake.

11. Me

Ezra Pound, Tolstoi and Edgar Allen Poe are the only writers deserving of "best" that aren't Shakespeare

1. Cervantes
2. Goethe
3. who cares

you literally can’t argue with me

>Goethe

Hemingway's has impressive control over his writing but pales to the sublimity power of a methodically-wild writer like Faulkner. Hemingway could be described as a top-tier example of a writers workshop genius, but not an artistic genius.

>prose command isn't artistic

What the fuck do you even value?

Faulkner is a better storyteller, but if you break down writing into its natural subdivisions you end up with ten lists of ten names. Honestly the ranking of artists is THE most pretentious thing you can do but denying one artist's greatness to hoist up another is just being a lil fanboi bitch.

>this is your brain if you were born in america

No but fucking seriously, David Foster Wallace:

>prose is better than 99.999% of writers

Jesus fucking Christ, you goddamned undergraduate twenty year old american, get your head out of your ass. Do you think Sufjan is superior to Bach as well?

I don't compare older dead guys to less old dead guys. I appreciate what an artist does in their time and place with the resources available.

Bach has NO bangers

Hemingway has moral vision on the same scale, he's just been slandered and judged by his poorest work and judged through his poor imitators. You wouldn't derive your opinions of Faulkner from Pylon, would you?

Go back and read the short stories, and the major novels and try to let go of your preconceptions of him as some kind of macho dude or whatever.

Monolingual red blooded American. What's it like knowing that everyone but England and Germany has inferior prose, poetry AND philosophy?

Prose command is a component of art, yes, but not the art itself. Overall I see Faulkner as far superior.
Well you could be right. My conception comes from reading Hemingway a while ago.

I mean is it worth it to keep reading if I suck at it?

op.. easy on the modernists

Post the Proust pasta

Embarrassing.

You’re not wrong.

To each their own, but putting Stein on a greatest of all time list is pushing it, let alone placing her above Proust, Beckett, etc. And Faulkner certainly doesn't rate next to Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Virgil, Lucretius, Cao Xueqin, dozens of others.

>Homer not number 1
Filthy commoners

ok. ok. wow. just. ok. here are the true rankings, and I would go as far as saying that the rest of fiction as a whole is a waste of time, and you're better off reading poetry or watching TV instead of reading authors who are not in this list

SUPREME MASTER GOD TIER: THE MASTER OF ALL IN THE KINGDOM OF GREAT WRITERS IN HUMAN HISTORY, AT THE TOP OF THE HIGHEST TOWER, MASTURBATING 10-15 TIMES PER DAY, AS THE HAND WITH WHICH HE WRITES ARTISTIC MASTERPIECES IS MORE SEXUALLY APPEALING THAN ANY ADONIS THE GODS CAN CONJURE
>Proust

VICE-SUPREME MASTER GOD TIER: THE ONLY WRITER DESERVING TO BE IN SAME ROOM AS THE SUPREME MASTER GOD
>Joyce

GOD TIER: OCCUPYING THE MARBLE CASTLE WITH THE SUPREME AND VICE SUPREME MASTER GOD
>Tolstoy
>Homer
>Dante
>Dostoevsky
>Shakespeare

ANGELIC DEMON TIER: PATROLLING THE CASTLE WALLS OF THE GOD TIERS AND ABOVE, AND DOING THEIR BIDDING ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, CAPTURING AND PILLAGING ENTIRE PLANETS TO TO INTO PLANET-SIZED "THE MATRIX"-TYPE BODY HARVESTING FARMS, BUT THEY HARVEST HUMAN FARTS INSTEAD OF ELECTRICITY, PACKED IN DIAMOND JARS, FOR THE FART-LOVING PROUST AND JOYCE TO HOLD UP TO THEIR NOSES AND SHIFT THEIR NOSES LEFT AND RIGHT ALONG THE RIM OF THE JAR LIKE SNIFFING A FINE WINE, THEN TAKING A HUMONGOUS INHALE AND ACHIEVING UNFATHOMABLE ORGASM, "AH, A 2017 RUSSIAN LUMBERJACK FART, GOOD YEAR" THEY SAY, NODDING THEIR HEADS AT THE ANGELIC DEMONS WHO DO THEIR BIDDING, THE ANGELIC DEMONS' HEARTS FILLED WITH JOY AT THE HONOR OF SERVING THEIR MASTERS
>Goethe
>Kafka
>Chekhov
>Morrissey
>Nabakov
>Melville
>Chaucer
>Cervantes
>Ambrose motherfucking Bierce!

HONORABLE DRAGON WORK CREATURE TIER: THESE WRITERS' SOULS HAVE POSSESSED THE BODIES OF DRAGONS WITH LIME GREEN FUR AND FLORESCENT TIGER STRIPES WHO BREATHE GAMMA RAY BURSTS AND CIRCLE THE SUPREME MASTER GOD'S KINGDOM BY THE MILLIONS, AND OPERATE AS A HIVE MIND, AND HAVE BEEN GENETICALLY MODIFIED WITH TARDIGRADE DNA TO SURVIVE IN SPACE AND EVEN BLACK HOLES, TO HONOR WORKS THAT I ENJOYED PERSONALLY BUT THAT MAY NOT BE AS JUSTIFIED ON AN ARTISTIC LEVEL BY CONSENSUS
>Hesse
>Pynchon
>Hemingway
>Foster Wallace
>Woolf
>Flaubert
>George Eliot
>Balzac
>Borges

Thoughts on this list?

Ñ

This is actually a nice ranking, but

>Proust

Keep trying, kiddo.

>01. William Shakespeare
>02. Homer
>03. Dante Alighieri
>04. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
>05. Herman Melville
>06. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
>07. Miguel de Cervantes
>08. William Butler Yeats
>09. Leo Tolstoy
>10. James Joyce

>Chekhov
top kek m8 he's not fit to lick Pushkin's boots

>no Goethe

>Morrissey
u fucking wot m8

Seems kind of random at parts, especially with the mix of science and philosophy. What exactly is the criteria here?

sick lists, my dudes. here’s my own, let me know what you guys think:
1. me
2. me
3. me
4. me
5. me
6. my
7. mother
8. fucking
9. diary
10. desu

I'd rank fucking over mother but the rest looks good

Your taste is so fucking basic.

wmjas.wikidot.com/reading-list

1. Shakespeare
2. Kadare
3. McCarthy
4. Melville
5. Cervantes
6. Nabokov
7. Kazantzakis
8. Faulkner
9. Hasek
10. Wolfe

>ctrl+f
>no conrad

You basic bitches

Meme garbage

these lists make me want to burn all my books

Lewis Carrol
Shakespeare
Joyce
Voltaire
Rabelas
Hugo
Keats
Fitzgerald
Poe
Hesse

>Voltaire
>Carrol
>even top 20
the rest is sound

1 shakespeare
2 milton
3 melville
4 rilke
5 dostoevsky
6 virginia woolf
7 franz kafka
8 don delillo
9 cormac mccarthy
10 emily dickinson

Why would Pynchon not be on the list? He's stylistically better than all of them probably. Do detractors say his substance is lacking or what? Just curious.

Homer
Dostoevsky
Nietzsche
Chekhov
Shakespeare
Rochefoucauld
Poe
Tolstoy

>Dostoevsky above Tolstoy
nice to see Veeky Forums is still full of immature edgemasters

>Kafka
The pleb-tier quality of posters who mistake depressive and ultimately subversive teenage-directed misanthropy for good writing never ceases to amaze me. Can you emotionally move beyond 16? Is it really that difficult? Because anyone who does quickly realizes that Kafka is a horrible writer.