ITT: Mediocre authors that pop culture hailed as master writers

The fuck? Are you retarded?

Jane Austin was actually important. She was at the forefront of literary realism and moved past traditional sentimental novels into actual psychological depth

>inb4 but shes a woman

>value signaling
What?

Lost all respect for her when she went turbo-political.

>McElroy

Austen is important because she's a woman, not in spite of it. She's important for women's literature, she more or less paved a way, but that doesn't mean she's particularly great. She's only important in retrospect, because she had great influence on a lot of the writers, female or not, that came after her. That's about it though. I don't think you need to read her to "understand" women writers.

Hemmingshit

Completely agree

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>capote

Remove him to make the list perfect.

Only americans think he has literary merit

>mfw didn't even know I was American

That's to be expected, how much could a non-american relate to his writing? Does something have to be universally understood to have literary merit?

You almost fooled me, user
Almost

any british author in the past 70 years

Dostoyevsky to be frank

Jane Austen was nice tho.
Hell, cheap tributes/wannabes like Norrell and Strange still manage to impress readers, even on Veeky Forums at times.

actually one of the few pop ones I think deserve it.
If you look past the mediocre style and unsubtle namings or symbolism, the story and characterization are among GOAT.

I don't think anyone hailed her as a master of writing, she just wrote a lot and her stories were good/cheap and adds to the litany of English murder mysteries that many are still obsessed over to this day.

I went to her house in Torquay few years back. Nice place, she routinely buried her pets, so theres a weird animal graveyard out front before you enter the house.

I know it's a meme to slag him off but DFW was legitimately a literary genius and I wish he'd have stayed alive and written far more

It's a meme to praise him. He wrote some nice essays but his fiction is just so bad.

His writing is so thoroughly American in its wit and style that I wouldn't expect a Yuropeon like yourself to understand it.
You literally cannot read Twain as a Yuropoor

No one thinks Agatha Christie is a genius, she's just an entertaining writer that was very prolific and always delivers good mysteries, she's not hailed as some kind of Shakespeare because she isn't one

>Gass
He's good, but holy god, so many fucking similes on one page it's disgusting.

I understand to an extent, but come on, there's nothing American about The Prince and The Pauper for example.

George R.R Martin
>that lovely,robust dazzling sea of blue seashells which look like the ocean in summertime
How he describes food

Gurm is a hack when it comes to prose but his stories are Bretty Gud

Graham Greene
EM Forster
Sadie Smith
Salman Rushdie

these mediocrities are demi-gods here

I don't think thats true (me=Britfag, love Twain as much as anyone), but if it were itd be a huge mark against a writer - theres nothing lower than provincialism

no
yes
yes
yes
yes
no
no
no
no
no

When will people finally be able to distinguish between good world building and good writing? It seems all fantasy writers just need to copy the lotr blue print have good world building skills and that'll make them the next Tolkien.

Greene is actually good though

Tolkien. Yes, Tolkien with his Bore of the Years.

George R.R Martin. "Lots of important characters die. Lots of fug." FUCKING REVOLUTIONARY MY BROTHA. Just put down the pen and show it up that neckbeard's hungry ass.

J.K Rowling. "And then Harry does uninteresting shit in uninteresting places during the course of six hundred and seventy books." The Jesus of people who embraced the meme-personality of the geeky pseudo-nerd 20-something (/wo)manchild.
"But I loved it as a child" Go and fuck yourself.

Now that I think of it, every single popular fantasy writer is shit.

Stephen King. He's good. Fuck it, he's great. He's too over-hyped though. The kind of people who are fans of Stephen King don't read shit but Stephen King. He has achieved "Meme-writer" status.

Walt Whitman. Very patriotic, much godfearing, so American. His poems became the hymn of easy bitches hanging out at Starbucks in the afternoon and obscure nightclubs in the evening. A Walt Whitman tattoo is the tramp-stamp of wannabe-literaries. Bonus points for coming from a small American town as a daughter of a conservative family. I mean, shit, I'm European and I've met expats/tourists who fit the description. Not one, not two, more like ten.

George Orwell: A classic. Fucking great. Still overhyped. Chances are, most of his readers should use the tags #cancomprehendEnglish #finallyreadclassics #notevenareader when posting selfies on their Instagram profile filled with pictures of chainstore foods and coffees declared as "hipsterish" by buzzfeed.

+any writer who's part of the HS curriculum in the United States. I don't know what the fuck is up with you, but you're the only nation that takes pride in reading books they are OBLIGATED TO read by the curriculum, and even going as far as declaring themselves "readers" and "intellectuals" because they've went through the intellectually challenging task of reading shit like Lord of the flies and Great Gatsby.

Agree with everything except the fact that JK Rowling is actually GOAT with characterization and some other shit. Also

>Orwell
>good
>not a fucking fedora

theyre just pop fiction writers, noone thinks jk rowling or stephen king are great writers. some of you guys must LIVE on tumblr and reddit if youre hearing this a lot

more like poop fiction writers

This, a thousand times over

u just know zadie is a superfreak

>you're the only nation that takes pride in reading books they are OBLIGATED TO read by the curriculum, and even going as far as declaring themselves "readers" and "intellectuals" because they've went through the intellectually challenging task of reading shit like Lord of the flies and Great Gatsby.
I really don't know what you're getting at. Schools have curricula, and follow them, and then the students read the assigned books. And hardly anyone brags about what they read in high school. What's the problem?

>can't into pomo

did you read the post

whoever wrote the hunger games

it's exactly the opposite

>Very patriotic, much godfearing
you obviously haven't even read whitman if this is your impression of LoG

no u

>American
>wit
Wew

Joyce
Tolstoy
Foster-Wallace
Pynchon
Cervantes
Homer

Austen

0/10 weak attempt keep trying

I went to American public schools. Some of the reading list was trash but we read Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Twain, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Salinger, etc. A lot of good entry-level stuff.

Nietzsche liked him.

>Joyce
>Cervantes
>HOMER
Well this isn't obvious trolling at all

what the fuck

John Green
JK Rowling
Petrarch
Confucius
Sun Tzu

Flannery O'Faggot

Can't comment on Petrarch.

Agreed on all the obvious ones.

100% on Sun Tzu, in a way. His works are not really interesting and to any experienced General they would be just as helpful as giving a physicist a grade 2 science book. However, some of Sun Tzu's principles are quite important for any inexperienced person to consider.

Confucius is pretty cool.

Dostoyevsky

Márquez

Okay, he's not mediocre. But he's far from being the endgame of all literature in Spanish. In fact many of his contemporaries were much better than him. Oh well, blame the gringos and Oprah's bookclub

>no one's posted Ayn Rand yet

uhm??

OMG DUDE FUCK YOU

What did she say?

petrarch is actually good as fuck, if you think hes bad is because he had so much influence on its successors it may seem cliché

Colombian here. I can't think of a contemporary of his who was anywhere near his level. He was like Shakespeare in that he appealed to plebs and patricians both.

Not even pop culture hails Rand as a '''''''''''''master writer'''''''''''''

Why do you care what pop culture has to say?

Mitchell is great, though.

Harper Lee

Most Americans read To Kill A Mockingbird at a certain impressionable age. TKAM isn't bad, but isn't a great piece of literature, and it isn't nearly as profound as most Americans remember it being.

Rulfo, Borges, Cortázar

It's ok, I really like Márquez too but he is way overblown

>Capote
Nein

Twain was witty. It's why he stands out among American writers. He's literally the only witty one. Many others have tried, but without any success.

Possibly the worst post I've ever seen on Veeky Forums, even if bait

main reason I put the Tunnel down 20 pages in

Percy Shelley is fantastic tho

She once said Trump was worse than Voldemort.

Samefag

I slept through Huckleberry Finn.

I've read his work twice - both times different translation and I see nothing that would make you call him great or amazing writer. I don't see anything in Tolstoy either.

I like Gogol and Šolohov so I don't hate on slavic literature mindlessly. I just find them dull, boring, tiresome to get through.

I like Hemingway but I agree.

You're truly an idiot, user.

There's far more idiocy from ill-read retards in this one thread, than there is in all the rest of the board combined. Why do the fucking mods even allow this bullshit?

I don't know about this, I know a lot of Europeans who like his writing.

what about Anthony Powell and Geoffrey Hill? or wastes just an uninformed blanket accusation?

I think Dostoievski has quite a few good books, and he was certainly a master in psychology and characterization. However he was just not a very good writer from a technical standpoint. His style feels rambling at times, and honestly quite unfocused. I'm reading a compilation of his short stories and half of them start like:

>I saw a wedding two days ago... But no! I better tell you about this and this and that instead
>This story is about Mr. Ivan Ivanovski. The author of course must feel compelled to explain why our hero has this name...
>I have to apologize to the reader to present such and such instead of X. Of course I also have to apologize to myself for writing about such and such and not X, but this story will prove whatever about our hero, hence why I'm writing such and such and not X.

Llosa

>However he was just not a very good writer from a technical standpoint
I cannot much say, as I've only read translations and never (and never will) in Russia, but none of the books impressed me like Quiet Flows the Don for example..

>psychology
>characterization
Notes from the Underground and Crime & Punishment spring to mind immediately, credit where credit due they were good to decent in that context, maybe they aren't just for me and more power to people who can enjoy them.

not even a good one in the past 700 years lmao

I've only read translations too, to be fair. But he is not really praised for his prose by Russians either. I think that's a big part of why Nabokov (who read him in Russian) hated him.

Greene runs from shit to the sublime

For all her rambling books, she is at least unique and interesting.