What is Veeky Forums's top three?
Mine are:
1) Vladimir Nabokov (which is interesting, given that English wasn't his first language);
2) James Joyce;
3) Cormac McCarthy.
Plot is next-to irrelevant. A good prose-stylist can make ordering from Taco Bell sound interesting.
Honorary English-translation author goes to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Melville, Browne and Burton
>no faulkner
Le trash man
HD
Joyce
Woolf
Don't mention that corn cobbler in a nabby thread
I honestly think McCarthy does what Faulkner does but better.
>1) Vladimir Nabokov (which is interesting, given that English wasn't his first language);
Nabokov was raised with English too, you can't call it a second language
>Honorary English-translation author goes to Friedrich Nietzsche.
What
True. But still he spent more time speaking Russian and even French, and the corpus of the first half of his life was in Russian.
On the second point: Nietzsche is perhaps the single greatest prose stylist of *any* Western language. Not strictly speaking "literature," though his philosophical writings are more literary than most.
None of those are even close though. Nabokov's skills lie in description, alliteration, etc.
Most of his prose would be unremarkable in essay form, for example. If you want great prose writers, you'd read someone like Thomas Browne or Abraham Lincoln
>mfw my English is quite good yet I read all of those in translation
It's not fair how pretty much any author's prose benefits just from being translated into Spanish
I guess your English isn't so good as you think it is.
just god damn I wish there were pictures of this sluts feet
Nabokov is a tryhard who writes in a tryhard prose style. You can hear him straining to write "great prose" if you bother to focus in on how he actually writes. Faulkner, by contrast, writes effortlessly.
Faulkner unironically name dropped in a discussion about greatest prose stylists? Kek.
Muh corn cobby inbred dialect. Muh literally retarded POV. Effortless like pottery.
"Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old."
The only correct answer in this thread.
>Veeky Forums
Woolf
Joyce
Gass
McCarthy really is doing a kind of Faulkner impression, isn't he? I never made that connection but it seems obvious now that I think about it.
i've heard that gass's prose is flatulent and overwrought
Mine would be
>author of Beowulf
>Chaucer
>Garner
You're right, if we wanted a genuinely effortless POV of a retard we'd just read the shit that you write.
we're talking prose, chief. get off Veeky Forums and practice your close reading.
Oops, read it as "anastomose virus."
McCarthy's prose is fun fluff next to Faulkner's fluent lyricism.
Top 3:
1) Faulkner
2) Pynchon
3) Nabokov
Runners up:
4) DeLillo
5) Marilynne Robinson
6) Toni Morrison
It is true.
do you read anything not written in the last 50 years?
Johnson
Emerson
Joyce
in no specific order
Thomas Browne
Laurence Sterne
(at this moment I realized 3 is far too short)
Henry Miller
Herman Melville
Thomas DeQuincey
Alexander Theroux
Cormac McCarthy
Go back to /r/books
would you like me to list more?
No I'm saying to go back because you can't follow rules. Which means you're not autistic enough to be here.
Yes. Virginia Woolf is a favorite. Beyond that, I've only read translations of older works, and this thread pertains prose style, my guy.
Umm... Did I not just tell you to go back to /r/books? The fuck you doing replying to anyone? Did you think I was joking? Don't reply, just fucking leave.
1) my
2) diary
3) desu
Yes.
>Ummm
hahahah faggot
That's it buddy. Now I'm going to trace your IP.
You think I'm gay, OP? Well, then. No I'm not gay I'm just a kind person. Doesn't mean I'm effeminate. I like to kill things.
> H.L. Mencken
You a faggot cell kill itself you ducker ugly niece of sh*p
Go away. Go away. GI away. GI away. Duck. GOOOOOOOOOOOO AWAYYYYYYYYHYYYYY 8) u ugly
Good post.
Also
>Cardinal Newman
>Lord Macaulay
>James Branch Cabell
>Abraham Lincoln
prose has been written in english since the 1500's my guy
oh, it's this thread again
>ctrl+F
>"gibbon"
>phrase not found
"patricians" of Veeky Forums
What are some examples?
Thomas More
Philip Sidney
>plot is next-to irrelevant
How to spot a pleb: the thread
Nice list.
thomas nashe is great
anatomy of melancholy
thomas browne as I mentioned
some famous diarists like Evelyn or Pepys
Lawrence Durrell, I cannot recommend him enough
he's a ___big___ guy
Repetitive and pretentious
>HD
Her prose is a disaster
>Woolf
Her work is fucking boring bullshit. The cadences are too often at the expense of sense, and the speed of her sentences are a manneristic trick, the cheap counterfeit of beauty.
Like Updike, his prose is superficially pretty, yet his observations of visual reality are almost always strained and false, which is a defect, considering how much importance Nabokov puts on visual description. He uses a lot of glossy, lurid, overblown language, pretty in itself but completely unfitting for the subject matter at hand.
The real masters of English prose are Herman Melville, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Runners-up are Browne and Burton, Dickens, Austen, and Joyce.
>Like Updike, his prose is superficially pretty, yet his observations of visual reality are almost always strained and false
Absolutely false. They're vivid and true.
>Dickens, Austen
Nothing remarkable about their prose in itself. They're better known for their characters and situations than anything.
>Henry James
Didn't you just censure Updike for false description? James is full of that.
1.) Salinger
2.) Nabokov
3.) Joyce
1.) theodore geisel
2.) russell edson
3.) william shakespeare
SUP
You miss lot of stuff with Nabo and obviously with Joyce in Spanish.
Itt. Spanish speaker
Finally, fucking this.