Who has a real claim at being the best prose stylist in the English language? Was it Joyce? Melville? F. Scott Fitzgerald?
>Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel- forbidding- now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
Lincoln, de Quincey, Fitzgerald, Addison, Cardinal Newman
Camden James
His prose is pretty mediocre
Jaxon Butler
Melville is absolutely up there. As is Newman, as states. Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon are underrated these days. Chesterton's not bad either.
I'm uncertain about Joyce. He's obviously brilliant but his tendency to fart around and be experimental really hinders his work being considered beautiful.
Liam Sanchez
Lincoln?
Justin Ross
Dubliners is great but I agree, he went too far up his own ass with Finnegans wake and a large portion of Ulysses.
Henry Murphy
unironically Salinger... but not because of Catcher in the Rye
Brandon Butler
What did Joyce mean by this? Is it metaphor?
Lucas Hall
He just loved farts
Brandon Green
Woolf has to be in the running.
Chase Evans
woolf sucks a fat one. Gimme her best sentences
Anthony Sullivan
Melville, and unironically Nabokov and McCarthy
James Baker
>the more and the more God damn ugly
Gavin Jackson
Nabokov is /r/iamverysmart tier
Chase Evans
It's nice knowing that from here to forever we'll have assholes telling us that we "just don't understand" Finnegans Wake.
I guess the secret to being thought vast and deep is incomprehensible writing.
Levi Rogers
>Melville
I don't think any book has ever hit me psychologically and emotionally the way that Moby-Dick did. It's a shame that most people will never read it and just think of it as some old meme book that they'll be comfortable with pretending to know something about but have never touched.
Eli Ramirez
Honestly at times I found that book a real fucking slog with all the stuff about the technicalities of whaling I just didn't care about but I'm glad for having stuck with it because that writing was absolutely incredible.
Lincoln Price
don't read Hemingway. He loves repetition.
Ethan Gutierrez
but it is vast and deep nevertheless
Jason Davis
F Scott Fitzgerald must surely in the running
> “One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
