Who's worth reading from the classic 20th century American novelists, i.e. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Salinger...

america has produced the only thing resembling 'lit' since the 1970's. Obviously it';s not as good as early 20th century European literature, but imagine Today's literary landscape without Gaddis, Pynchon, DFW, DeLillo, McElroy, Toole, etc.

>america has produced the only thing resembling 'lit' since the 1970's

zadie smith, margaret atwood, anthony burgess, martin amis, will self, philip larkin, ballard, rushdie, bellow and bolaño would like to have a word with you

Here's a comprehensive of most of the American authors and poets worth looking at. I hope this helps.

Thomas Jefferson
Henry Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edgar Allan Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
Mark Twain
Henry James
Ezra Pound
Hart Crane
W.H Auden
T.S Eliot
William Faulkner
Thomas Wolfe
Ernie Hemingway
Gertrude Stein
John Steinbeck
Ralph Ellison
F. Scott Fitzgerald
J.D. Salinger
William Burroughs
Jack Kerouac
William Gaddis
John Hawkes
Donald Barthelme
William Gass
John Barth
Robert Coover
Gil Orlovitz
Raymond Federman
Joseph McElroy
Joseph Heller
Kurt Vonnegut
Thomas Pynchon
Gilbert Sorrentino
Toni Morrison
Ishmael Reed
Alexander Theroux
Don DeLillo
Gene Wolfe
Samuel Delaney
Harry Mathews
David Markson
John Ashbery
Cormac McCarthy
Norman Mailer
Stanley Elkin
D. Keith Mano
Ronald Sukenick
Stephen Dixon
Walker Percy
Saul Bellow
John Kennedy Toole
David Foster Wallace
William T. Vollmann
Sergio De La Pava

bump

A world without pomo? Sounds nice.

Wallace Stevens!

Oh yeah. I know I missed a lot of poets.

Sounds terrible, user.

Be like Eminem from the Rap God music video

That guy's obviously wrong but this list is fucking terrible

not everyone goes to a good school

in public school literally everyone is a retard and you're encouraged to be as retarded as possible

Of all of the more modern authors you could have chosen from, somehow--somehow--you picked some of the worst.

I feel like Pynchon wasted his talents. The first paragraph of GR is beautiful but then it transitions into this wacky joke sequence where every character has the most retarded name possible and I think "Ok it's some dream section" but no, it just goes on and on and it's not going to be a serious novel. I also don't see how TCoL49 is better than anything Vonnegut wrote. More retarded names as well. Every time I read the word "Oedipa" or "Fallopian" I wanted to gouge my eyeballs out.

I don't get why people here look up to Pynchon so much. The only thing resembling 'lit' since the 1970s? Well count out tommy boy since he pretty much flopped after 1973 even by the standards of his fans. Nobody ever talks about anything he wrote since GR that's not M&D.

>Gaddis

I've honestly never read this author. I get him mixed up with Gass all the time and they both sound dense and unpalatable.

>DFW

I've seen fags here meme this guy and argue about him every day for over five years but somehow I've never given his books a try. That's my own fault though, not a criticism.

>Dellilo

Everything I've read by him that's not Underworld is bad. White Noise is one of my least favourite novels.

>McElroy

literally who? Even by literary standards. W&M is about as enjoyable as a math textbook, it's completely unreadable. Maybe his other books are nicer.

>Toole

Le hotdog man got memed so hard in old Veeky Forums that it spoiled any desire I had to read his book. I also don't like the title at all.

>people who use i.e. and e.g. interchangeably

:^(

>I don't like fun: the post

>I've honestly never read this author. I get him mixed up with Gass all the time and they both sound dense and unpalatable.
Both are great, but, considering your other opinions, I doubt you would like them.
>I've seen fags here meme this guy and argue about him every day for over five years but somehow I've never given his books a try. That's my own fault though, not a criticism.
Do you even read?
>Everything I've read by him that's not Underworld is bad. White Noise is one of my least favourite novels.
Mao ll is one of the best works of the 20th century, bro.
>literally who? Even by literary standards. W&M is about as enjoyable as a math textbook, it's completely unreadable. Maybe his other books are nicer.
No offense, but I'm a little doubtful that you've actually read Women and Men. And by the way, all of his works are equally or more dense.
>Le hotdog man got memed so hard in old Veeky Forums that it spoiled any desire I had to read his book. I also don't like the title at all.
That's ridiculous--you're ridiculous.

Based off your entire post, I can tell that you don't actually enjoy reading, which leads me to ask: why are you here?

Have you ever read "A Confederacy of Dunces"? That books is hilarious while also giving a commentary of modern life that is more at place now than it was 30 years ago.

Also, the title line is from the Irish author Jonathan Swift's quote, "When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him." If you would have read the book, you would understand the question of to what extent Ignatius is that "true genius."

He doesn't like shit-tier authors, therefore he doesn't "actually enjoy reading"? Nice try, troll.

Surprisingly, all of them. Faulkner is pretentious af, though; plays around too much with grammatical convention, and stream-of-thought is balls, at least from his pen.

Btw, Fitzgerald is Tender is the Night, not the mediocre Gatsby. And be sure to read Franny & Zooey by Salinger, not just Catcher. (Though Catcher is his masterpiece.)

>tfw in freshman english class we started with the greeks

private school is up to date with memes