/lit/ - Literature

Inb4 DFW.

James has generated the largest number of scholarly articles in the past 25 years.

>http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/03/26/mla-rankings/

If you think his late style was unnecessarily stuffy you can find a 24 page defense of it by way of a Cambridge style dissection of the first paragraph of the Ambassadors.

>http://www.thenation.com/article/170785/masters-servants-henry-james#

>Herford pointed out that a famous essay by onetime Cambridge student Ian Watt, “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication” (1960), begins with a consideration of the uses of Cambridge-style practical criticism. Watt, for his part, noted that practical criticism is “better suited to verse than to prose,” and then launched into a twenty-four page explication of 256 of James’s words. He wanted to continue the Leavis tradition of approaching James as a poet, but also to mount a defense of James’s late style against Leavis, who celebrated The Bostonians and The Portrait of a Lady but pronounced The Ambassadors a “bad” book. Watt argued, and tried to show, that “all or at least nearly all” of James’s “idiosyncrasies of diction or syntax…are fully justified by the particular emphases they create.”

I can almost guarantee that this thread will end up in an argument about whether greatness equals average quality of work or sum of quality of work.

You seem to be working with the latter definition, OP, and I agree with you. And I think James is a good choice given that criteria. Twain would be my second place, especially if we're giving some sort of boon to distinctly American writing.

>Zadie Smith

stopped reading here

It's actually David Foster Wallace

Tao Lin

OP, are you asking in regards to quality, social commentary, or the author who's greatest reflect the American Ideal as average American Society has come to understand it?

>>3498296
The greatest tout court.

A great fire will burn everything every American poet/novelist has ever written save one author. What's your pick?

>>3498304
Stephen King

>>3498274
>>3498296
>>3498294
Trolls pls

I'm not sure, but i'm giving the silver medal to Steinbeck.

>>3498310
you're right, I REALLY should have stopped reading at

>Harold Bloom

>>3498274
Actually, it's Tommy P.

The poem is inherently superior to the novel, so I'll pick Wallace Stevens

>>3498319
But James' late works were just blank verse anyways.

>great chunk of Henry James, which was actually in blank verse anyway

>http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/481/the-art-of-fiction-no-168-a-s-byatt

>>3498304
Personally? Sherwood Anderson. Specifically Winesburg, Ohio and the works associated with it. The American Ideal is intrinsically tied up in that idea revolving around Small Town America. Yes, as a nation we possess some of the greatest metropolises of modern man, but even within those is that broken concept of the purity of small town america. The denizens of small town America rose up against the British in the Revolutionary War, the Brothers that killed each other during the Civil War, and the children who died in the theaters of Europe and the Pacific during both World Wars. He pulls that concept of the grotesque out of that concept, showcasing the pathetic, twisted reality of the human condition within the realm of that quasi-mythical wonderland of Small Town America. He rips the mask away, and reveals the still-beating, twisted heart of the American Dream

>>3498319
If Wallace was so great why didn't Auden write "At the Grave of Wallace Stevens"?

>http://www.unz.org/Pub/Horizon-1941jun-00379

>>3498334
because http://exiledonline.com/w-h-auden-the-worst-famous-poet-of-the-20th-century/

>>3498329
Interesting.

>>3498342
Thanks. Unfortunately, I haven't read anything of Henry James past The Ambassadors or The Turn of the Screw. I'm thinking I should rectify that

>>3498270
thats pretty good actually

Pynchon.

>>3498341
>exiled for literary criticism

No. There's no point even bothering reading that. The thesis is going to be, as always, "[The author under consideration] does not meet our minimum standards for edginess."

>>3498364
you haven't even read any of their stuff outside the dfw article, have you?

>>3498364
Sorry but John Dolan is one of the best literary critics alive

>>3498371
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dolan_(writer)

>He is married to his former student, Katherine Liddy. Dolan relocated to Canada to teach at the University of Victoria in Canada in 2006. He was fired for encouraging students to criticize George Monbiot in 2008.[1] Until spring 2010, Dolan was an associate professor of English composition and literature at the American University of Iraq - Sulaimani.[2] He was fired in 2010 and wrote a lengthy article on his experience there

An exemplar of edginess.

Come on /lit/ this isn't hard. The answer to the question is Herman Melville. Now you guys can go to sleep if you want.

>>3498387

he has also harassed the working class... shameful

>>3498368
Not much, but every one of them followed that same basic mode. Like this one. (You got me to go read it.)

>Auden was above all a conventional mind, voicing the commonplaces of middlebrows everywhere; and Yeats, to his credit, was an autodidact nutcase, supergluing his own ideology out of Irish nationalism intentionally poisoned with MacPherson’s glamorized defeatism, abstracted via the German mystics. Auden understood nothing of all that, as he makes clear in what is virtually the poem’s only attempt to discuss Yeats, its ostensible subject

>One part of the answer is that Auden’s utter conventionality precluded such an heretical awareness. And it’s that conventionality, which defines every word the man ever wrote, that underpins his continuing celebrity. The shortest answer to the question, “How do you get famous without poetic talent?” is: sleep around the hot universities and squeeze tears, then stage a well-timed conversion to the Right.

>>3498393
Based on the strength of Moby Dick alone?

>>3498397
No, he also wrote other novels, short stories and poetry

>>3498397
He wrote other shit than that.

Here's my vote. He's disappointed it took so long for him to be mentioned.

>>3498395

>I’m not in any way implying that Auden was calculating or insincere. Would he had been! Then he might have been an interesting poet. On the contrary, he was a genuine dunce, plodding along with the majority of middlebrow intellectuals who joined the Communists in the Thirties and then drifted back toward a vague, chastened piety after the war. If you want to see a very good, cruel account of the process, read Edmund White’s Memoirs of Hecate County. There were Audens cocktailing their way through every country club in Connecticut and the Home Counties; most of them simply didn’t pretend to be poets.

>Not because he’s the best writer of the period; he doesn’t even deserve to make the top thousand. The real list would be headed by Celine, a self-proclaimed “man of hate,” and Stevens, whose attitude toward the Great Depression was sneering contempt

I was not wrong. Not one bit. He starts off accusing Auden of being a maudlin careerist, but goes on to say he was too stupid to actually be a careerist, single-entendredly uses the word "middldebrow," praises Yeats for the bizarreness of his right-wing views, shits on Auden for "going right wing," by which he means becoming a Christian, and ends the piece praising fucking Celine and praising Wallace Stevens (who I have not enough experience with to assess at all) for having contempt for... the Great Depression? What the fucking fuck?

As far as the idea that embracing religious faith constitutes a political move to the right, are you fucking kidding me? Does Dolan really hate Christians this much more than Christopher Hitchens that every thing he writes about someone who's a Christian has to be about how stupid and conservative Christianity is?

(For the record, I hate Christianity, too.)

>>3498395
Maybe you should pay more attention to the stylistic criticisms, which support everything else he says

>>3498402
>ends the piece praising fucking Celine

>Most people know one thing about Celine: "Wasn't he a Nazi?" This cultivated ignorance holds even among people who are paid to know better; the first time I mentioned Celine at the New Zealand university where I taught, our department's leading lady pronounced solemnly, "A very bad man." (Incidentally, she was a big fan of Kipling, who was apparently not a bad man at all.)

>>3498258
No one is even close to Pynchon. Certainly not dowdy old Henry James.

Like on the world stage he would probably come into serious competition with Joyce and Proust and such, but as far as Americans go he is top hound, and probably boss of the English language till he dies.

>>3498405
I think his stylistic criticisms are plain wrong, a might-as-well-be-deliberate missing the point, and he engages with precisely two poems, one of them fairly significant in Auden's body of work but nowhere near defining it and the other which is exceedingly minor and which he claims is Auden's worst.

But it doesn't matter if they're right or not. Every single piece of literary criticism by John Dolan I've read is a posturing POS where he dresses down a writer for not being as edgy as he is. Like I said: his thesis always seems to be that the author is insufficiently edgy; that thesis is not one worth examining. It wouldn't even matter if he occasionally scored points; it's a useless and toxic enterprise without much real relation to the appreciation or assessment of literature.

>>3498431
What of James have you read?

>>3498440
I can show you a couple reviews where he praises writers for being edgy

>>3498445
Here's one where he actually praises a member of the Tao Lin crew: http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=8034&IBLOCK_ID=35

>>3498426

>look at how much edgier I am than a "leading lady" in my department!

Celine was a fascist and an anti-Semite who collaborated with the Nazi occupation; reducing this to "a Nazi" is quite acceptable. And yes, it makes him suspect.

What condemns Celine- who, yes, could string together sentences pretty well- is not just that he hated Jews, it's that hated everything. And that's all there is to Celine: well-prosed edge. Of course Dolan likes him.

(Someone is going to accuse me of simply not wanting to engage with nihilism. I'm not a nihilist, but the basic problem with nihilism as a foundation for works of art is that it's fucking boring and predictable, e.g. Dolan. We are not drawn to people for their lassitude or their hatreds, and I'll take the moment to note that it's rather unbecoming a man who's realized everything is worth nothing to be banging on about it. We're drawn to people for their enthusiasms. The most useful aesthetic posture is one of crying down the things that are holding back whatever the author has decided is or are the essential enthusiasms, which are at least implicitly embraced and hailed.)

>>3498455
Quickly scanning, because I don't want to spend too much more time on John Dolan tonight, I'll note that he makes an effort to understand an aesthetic break in Noah Cicero, whereas with Auden it's just a sign of how he couldn't think of a rhyme.

>>3498468
Not just rhymes, did you miss:

>And why for that matter, is poetry reduced to another one of your determinedly Platonic metonymies, “mouth” – aside from the appalling pun on riparian geography? Why, indeed, does this river which flows into the mouth flow “ON south” rather than simply “south” – could it be that you needed an extra syllable there?

and

>that famous, rotten hyperbaton, “About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters….”

>>3498475
Yeah, I just don't get what's objectionable in those constructions. It sounds like Dolan just doesn't like poetry that doesn't roll off completely smoothly, that he doesn't appreciate more casual or conversational rhythms, or unexpected sounds or symbols, or things where the speaker pauses for a thought-breath, feels out for an idea.

I'm sure he hates Whitman and Ginsberg, for instance.

>>3498487
Or, here: my thesis is that all Dolan's criticism consists of is vaunting edginess; he doesn't engage with or appreciate anything that isn't about misery and degradation or that has the stupidity to dream of a way out of them or even substantial consolation.

Any pieces counter that? Because that's every Dolan piece I've read, including the ones you're handing me.

>>3498497
how about his review of a harry potter movie: http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7372&IBLOCK_ID=35

>>3498505
how about this review of a children's book about mammals: http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7306&IBLOCK_ID=35

>>3498505
oops, wrong one, that review is VERY edgy

http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6794&IBLOCK_ID=35

Gaddis.

how about this one where he tears down a hack philosopher: http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7690&IBLOCK_ID=35

>CTRL+F
>8 results for edgy/edginess/edgier

>>3498497

or maybe because you represent the type of people he despises (as seen in your knee-jerk reaction to celine which makes me assume you must be an american since denouncing artists for being antisemitic -- arbitrary reason -- would mean denouncing most of the european culture)

>I set out to praise really good writers in this column, and I'm finding it difficult. It's much easier to damn bad books than to praise good ones; you almost want to keep the best books to yourself, because the prospect of seeing them rejected -- or worse, loved for the wrong reason -- is so terrible. But even a reviewer who specializes in damning the bad has to praise the good, if only to show the standard the bad books fail to reach.

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6569&IBLOCK_ID=35

then again, i'm replying to a person who thought dolan mentioning celine & wallace in an article about re-imagining the 20th century canon was a non sequitur. that article about auden isn't solely a lit critique, it's also an essay on institutional reception and cultural trends w/ some funny autobiographical passages. maybe you should actually read it, its pretty good

>>3498553
Nah, that article was totally torn apart in the comments section. Also he confused Edmund Wilson with Edmund White somehow??

Hemingway.

>The American
>Great American novel
>A work that decries the notion of being American and claims that the nationality doesn't actually exist

Lel.

John Steinbeck

>>3498569
He spent is whole life trying to get away from America and most of his works don't even take place there.

>>3498662
That would make Nabokov American then? OP said American.

>>3498431
Pynchon had some clever ideas and vivid description of images and such but his third tier psychology makes him a second tier novelist.

> The problem is that, like Don DeLillo, Pynchon has a tendency to use rhapsodic "fine writing" to smudge the coherence of his meaning, to let the music take the strain of the mystical. Here Reef, on the trail of Fresno and Kindred, reflects that the stooges are even worse than the plutocrats:

>>3498431
Psychon's form is incoherent.

>Again, the musical control is flawless, and the long sentence, slowly read, is perfectly comprehensible. Pynchon is saying that the drawings on the "Wanted" posters never looked like the real men, and that their unlikeness -- their "darkly textured style" -- tells us more about a "kind of remembering," an idea, or Barthesian "mythology" of the Wild West, than anything else. This accords with the novel's systematic argument against the possibility of finding the authentic: everything is mediated, pastiched, mirrored, seen through glasses darkly, or seen twice. But "the unholy longing going on out here" seems a little idle, a little vague, and it seems more idle and vague precisely because it is piled up like this in a lyrical list -- precisely because the music is trying to carry its sense for it, and throws it next to "the kind of remembering." The ellipsis in the above quotation is Pynchon's, and marks a section break; and in a way, the ellipsis is the only place this long sentence has to go -- into the empty terminus of broken meaning.

>>3498431
>One of the problems with hysterical realism, of which this novel is a kind of zany Baedeker, is that one suffers both the hysteria and the realism: the worst of both worlds. There is the weightless excess, the incredibilities, the boredom that always attends upon cartoonish, inauthentic novelistic activity. But there is also the boredom attendant upon the rather old-fashioned, straightforward realism used to create this very escape from realism. Thus one of the most peculiar elements of this clearly ambitious and daring novel is that its stylistic syntax is relatively undaring, and so conventional. Of course much of it is pastiche, so in a sense it slips out of the charge of conventionality. But the practical effect is a grammar of realism that challenges nobody and nothing.

James rarely had any blank spaces in his prose, for he never included second rate prose in his best works to make them as a counterpoint to some idiosyncratic style.

>>3498431
I'm not against a novel of ideas per we but Musil does it so much better.

>But what if you wanted a novel that had little plot but much internal story, that was morally and aesthetically complex, stylistically difficult and demanding, determined to put language to some kind of challenge, formally lovely and alluring, humanly serious but also humanly comic (I mean a book that comically investigated deep human motive)? A novel that was narrated in the internal voices of several different characters, but characters who really have their own voices, not just vaudeville ventriloquism? Well, then, you might read the great novels that are set in the same era as Against the Day: these include The Man Without Qualities, Remembrance of Things Past, The Radetzky March, The Secret Agent, Confessions of Zeno (which ends with a prophesy of something very like atomic destruction), The Magic Mountain (which ends with the Great War), The Good Soldier Svejk. Many of these are quite funny -- but not farcical -- novels, above all profoundly involved with the exploding of truths, then finally devoted to the search for truth.

Don DeLillo

>>3499193
Which works does that assertion rest on?

>>3498431
But I bet understanding Pynchon's puzzles satisfies your ego's recognition of its own cleverness.

>>3499195
White Noise and Underworld alone

>>3498258
I like Henry James. I like his style. I hate the subjects he writes on. If 90% of his stories were not about women/children/innocence/true love, then I think he would be my favorite author.

Truman Capote

TIL 4chan is still completely backwards on transgenderism. Every transperson is different, just like every other person is different, but there's some pretty easy rules. For the most part unless they're genderqueer, they just ARE the gender they present as. I don't know why gender confuses people so much, it doesn't even matter that much, why is everyone so obsessed with it? People act like a transman dating other men is confusing. It's not, it's two gay men dating each other. Genitals and how they stimulate each other really has nothing to do with their gender either, that's a completely different topic (sexuality). I really wish people would stop binding sexuality and gender together. What if a transwoman was asexual? Would it say anything about her gender? Not anymore than a ciswoman, right? It's like saying "Hey so if you were born a man but are now a woman, how do you deal with still liking football? Does that mean you're still really a man?

Steinbeck. This isn't even debatable.

>>3499204
What would you have him write about? What are your favorite books?

>>3499209
Is it now?
>>3499205
Tom Wolfe pls.

Kilgore Trout

>>3499222
You caught me. I enjoy non-fiction.

The last fiction that I can say I enjoyed without reservations was Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave.

The only other work of fiction that I enjoyed that I read relatively recently was Parallel Lives - Plutarch

>>3499238
So I, Claudius then? That kind of thing?

Do you like Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History?

>>3499174
>>3499175
>>3499180
>>3499184
>James Wood

Erm, no thanks.

>>3499246
James wood kicks the shit out of Howard Bloom.

>>3499246
Name a better critic of the novel. Oh wait you can't.

>>3499195
>But I bet understanding Pynchon's puzzles satisfies your ego's recognition of its own cleverness.

I'm reading it, not writing it--there really isn't that much for me to feel clever about. Anyhow I have better ways of making myself feel smart than sitting around smugly reflecting on my level of literacy.

Pynchon can take some thought and some leg work, but he's not some inaccessible tiddler who it takes a lifetime of study to understand.

>>3499245
I prefer Carlyle's Frederick the Great. I have read both.

I also disliked Gibbons Decline, if that is helpful

Obviously Hemingway.

>In Our Time
>The Sun Also Rises
>Death in the Afternoon

For these alone, he's already the best.

>>3499252
How about this one? It's less painful to read, at least: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/michael-wood/humming-along

I remember being assigned The Turn of the Screw in middle school and not understanding anything, haven't read him since... maybe I should.

>>3499263
Second.

Although in my opinion Faulkner's a close second.

>>3498397
As well as on Billy Budd, and other works like The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.

Herman Melville.

You e/lit/es need to read more than Moby Dick. Whether it's poetry or prose, it still blows my mind how ahead of the curve he was.

Pierre should be /lit/'s favorite book.

>>3499333
>>3499284
>>3499283
>>3499263
Have any of you read at least one of the last three completed novels of James? When people say that Hemingway was the best American novelist I get the suspicion that they've read little else. It seems like people just list off what they were taught in school.

>Christopher Ricks was eager to emphasize the importance of universities in determining writers’ reputations—sustaining them, and laying them to rest. “It used to be the case that, if you were wondering why x had enjoyed fame or suffered obloquy or neglect, it was because of the Church,” he told me. We were sitting in a tent in St. Anne’s College, at the end of a day that had started with his keynote lecture. The other speakers and delegates were conducting the reverse ritual of their anticipatory morning coffee: the reflective evening drink. Ricks and I were in a corner, talking about what he called the “conditions of patronage.” “Books are in print because of the most important patrons, and the most important patrons for the last fifty years have been the universities,” he said. “James stands in need of being taught.

http://www.thenation.com/article/170785/masters-servants-henry-james#

James is shit. Talent but not genius.

I'd put Faulkner, Pynchon, Melville, Hawthorne above him easily. And he's not match to Emerson and Whitman and other fag poets like Crane and Stevens.

I dunno, maybe you like some homo pretending he's a girl and writing chick lit, but for my tastes Proust does it better.

Hemingway IMO.

>>3500010
Pfft. More like Ernest VeryGay.

>>3499997
>James is shit. Talent but not genius.
What does Nabokov's dried shit-crumbs taste like?

And you haven't said who you liked best.

>>3500056
Best as a novelist? I'm not sure. Faulkner seems most consistent but Moby-Dick is the best american novel.

I'd put Scarlet Letter above anything Henry James wrote. Really atrocious stuff.

>>3499997
>I'd put Faulkner, Pynchon, Melville, Hawthorne above him easily.
The "easily" reveals that you have not read very much of James. Even the vilest of his detractors, having surveyed the bulk of the masterpieces, concede that James is something to be reckoned with.

>And he's not match to Emerson
Unfathomable that people still read Emerson in this day and age.

>>3500091
>I'd put Scarlet Letter above anything Henry James wrote. Really atrocious stuff.
What of James have you read completely through? You sound like one of those bitter folks who drowned in the Jamesian syntax and never recovered.

For an Emerson lover to put the didactic and puritan Scarlet Letter above James can only mean that you are wholly indifferent to him.

>>3500107
Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, Turn of the Screw and The Bostonians.

I liked Portrait and Bostonians the most. Still seems like transvestite homo chick lit fantasy.

7/10 if I'm feeling generous

>>3500145
You finished The Ambassadors and liked it less than The Bostonians?

James Joyce

Mark Twain. Easily.
Shoot me, that's how I feel.

>>3500145
>Still seems like transvestite homo chick lit fantasy.

>It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it—that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow: looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished. She had not wished till now—such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve, from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level.

>>3500145
>The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter, and even, verily, of one's paying with one's life if found there as an interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked, in short—though she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted.

Stephen King.

>>3500582
I guffawed, caught me off guard

Melville on the strength of Moby Dick alone

>>3500596

Most of the stuff I've encountered in my 3000-4000 level lit courses strikes me as bad dungeon crawler material or filler for filler's sake.

>>3500604
What's that have to do with King?

R.L Stine

>>3500602
I approve

>>3500615

Let me explain: King is a hackjob of a writer. We don't like his disdain for the artform.

>Ctrl + F "Fitzgerald"
>0 results

I'm proud of you, /lit/.

Emerson or Pierce

Everyone else can get fucked

>>3498583
>>3499207
>>3498311
My brothers.

T.S. Eliot. Poetry beats prose and he's the greatest American poet.

Albert Camus, the man was a genius.

Kurt Vonnegut. Definitely.

Intelligent, satirical, well written, has a unique flow, and still manages to be topical to this day. You can't beat it.

J.K. Rowling

best books ever

>>3501613

>Kurt Vonnegut.
>You can't beat it.

Underage new readers pls go.

>>3501661
>J.K. Rowling
>American

lol

It's hard not to think about Steinbeck.

I must say, I prefer his older, wiser brother.

>>3500855
>Pierce

>not James (William)

>reaction.png

>>3501774
>>3501775
>pragmatist mind

>>3498258
Never trust a man with two first names.

for me it's Walt Whitman or Sherwood Anderson. I will have to read Henry James though.

>>3501777

mah pragmaniggas

but fuck dewey

I just started reading Light in August. When does this thing start getting good?

>>3502406
>When does this thing start getting good?

I'm quite sick of mental defectives asking this question here.

>>3502415
You have third rate poetry mired in overwrought syntax painting the lives of a collection of hooligans. Mentally defective is exactly what Faulkner's vaudeville characters are.

>>3498270
Her whole criticism of James in that essay honestly boiled down to "Well, he was a man, and a young man at that, so naturally he didn't 'get' it."

>>3500217
"...the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs."
-- William Faulkner

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called "Huckleberry Finn." All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
-- Ernest Hemingway

"The mark of how good '"Huckleberry Finn" has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best modern American novels and it stands up page for page, awkward here, sensational there - absolutely the equal of one of those rare incredible first novels that come along once or twice in a decade."
-- Norman Mailer

"I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other American who has ever presumed to manufacture generalizations, not excepting Emerson. I believe that he was the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the royal blood."
-- H.L. Mencken

Mark Twain confirmed as the GOAT by other notable candidates for the position.

>>3503053
>>3503053
" ...James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation." - T. S. Eliot


"...I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen; indeed, I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that his mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual youth. The thing--a privilege--a miracle--what you will--is not quite hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read. To those who have the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After some twenty years of attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's work, it grows into absolute conviction which, all personal feeling apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's artistic existence. If gratitude, as someone defined it, is a lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy to be grateful to the author of The Ambassadors--to name the latest of his works. The favours are sure to come; the spring of that benevolence will never run dry. The stream of inspiration flows brimful in a predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of the land of letters, without languor or violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its course through that richly inhabited country its fertility has created for our delectation, for our judgment, for our exploring. It is, in fact, a magic spring..." - Joseph Conrad

"..He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them. I wouldn't dare to write one. I'm not even sure I'd dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down..." - Joan Didion

>>3503146
Twain has way more acclaim from his peers. You don't want to get in race, son. James will lose badly.

>>3503166
His critical reputation is far lower than James' in academia right now.

> Jack London

>>3499246
I'm reading his book ("The Making of Fiction") and I actually like some of his ideas, particularly his phrase "free indirect style."

>tfw no one mentions Washington Square

>>3503942
>implying time isn't a greater vindicator than academia

>>3504447
>tfw when James excluded it from the NYE

>>3504450
>implying James' reputation will ever fall below Twain's in academia

>implying that the academia of the future isn't what is immanent in the concept of "time" i.e. the audience of posterity

Really, the reputation of ancient works are almost entirely dependent on academia because the consensus of academia determines which classics are taught, and judgment is formed by early exposure; exhibit A is the high rank that the Great Gatsby has on the ML Top 100 Novels list.

People only like Henry James more than any other American novelist because he's so complicated

>>3504782
Leaves liked James but not the most complex James of the Golden Bowl but the middle James of the Portrait.

>>3504801
Most of the hardcore critics who praise James seem to do so for his late work...

>>3504806
You must really despise Joyce then.

Seriously.

>>3504821
No, I enjoy these guys, but I also like simpler things from time to time.

The greatest American poet, and the greatest American writer

James is shit

Flaubert is one million billion times better than this sissy faggot James. Reading Portrait of a Lady is like reading the annual sex issue of the magazine Cosmopolitan.

>>3505455
They're so similar though.

Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Stevens, James, James, Pynchon and.. Sherwood Anderson.

Is this the full pantheon of American writers?

At this moment in time, Tao Lin. I resisted his books for so long, but I succumbed; a review in The Guardian proved to be my undoing. Since then, I have devoured all his works and found them to be pleasing—disaffected, blasé prose, a keen eye for magnifying the mundane details. He's just so wonderful.

>>3506503
go to bed, Fredrick Barthelme

ctrl+f : mccarthy

no results.

disgusting.

>>3506585
Nothing apart from Meridian is worth reading.

>>3506609
This might be true. I'm reading Child of God for class currently and it's just nothing special.

>>3506609

All the pretty horses is great.

>>3506609
All of his work is worth reading.

Pynchon.

Duh.

>>3507350
The Road was pure shit.

>>3507365
Not at all. It's excellent. What didn't you like about it?

>>3498258
Donald Knuth.

>Heaviside

>>3498258

Howard Philips Lovecraft. If you disagree, you are a homosexual.

>>3507715

>Self-admitted hack who churned out purple prose pulp
>greatest American writer

If you've never even read James, whom OP posited as best, then you should just beat it, kid

>>3507370
>>3507370
It was written by Cormac McCarthy and the unwritten Encylopedia of being 2edgy4everyone says hating McCarthy on /lit/ is cool

>>3507766
It's terrible. He's exhausted his genius. HS a shadow of himself in that book.

John Steinback and Ralph Ellison. The Invisible Man and East of Eden are a couple of the greatest books I've ever read

>>3506609

>Nothing apart from Meridian is worth reading.

Spoken like someone who doesn't understand the brilliance of 'Suttree'.

Melville, Faulkner, Twain and Steinbeck in the running for greatest.

James, Pynchon, McCarthy, Crane and Whitman for runner up candidates.

I don't see the point of this thread, honestly There's no objectively sound method to determine "the greatest American writer." It would be more plausible to devise a tier hierarchy of great American writers. Unless you meant more to gauge the personal opinions of /lit/. In which case, I suppose my vote would go to Faulkner. But I certainly don't assert that as fact.

>>3508232

>I don't see the point of this thread, honestly

This would be a good post to make if you didn't just contribute a post prior, don't you think?

b-but Henry James never wrote Invisible Man!

>>3508613
>w-we're not in high school a-anymore Dorothy.

>>3508613
But HJ was very good friends with H.G. Wells for a time and their letters are really interesting.

Basically, I agree with OP, with exception of Melville and Poe who didn't write nearly as much.

>>3508693
What Melville is worth reading after Mody Dick and Scrivener?

>>3508693
>Invisible Man
Ellison, not Wells.

>>3508693
You don't even know about Ellison and you apparently think Poe is any more than mediocre so......

>>3508613
MY NIGGA

>>3508736
The Encantadas

Twain and then Faulkner, this is fact.

>>3509136
I think Henry James is better overall, but Faulkner's best books probably beat anything James has written. But Huck Finn and Moby-Dick are the two best American novels ever, and you can't argue with this.

I'll say Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
You did mean all of America, right?

>>3509531
What is Faulkner's single best?

>>3509684
As I Lay Dying. In this book Faulkner reveals himself as the true master of Black Comedy

>>3509531
>Henry James
favorite by him?

Silly me. The whole time I was reading this thread, "Henry James" mentally registered as "Henry Miller" and I kept thinking, "Man, did I miss something? Is OP Anais Nin?" Woops.

>>3509720
>favorite by him?
The Wings of the Dove

The change in sexual mores contributes much to the misunderstanding and under-appreciation of James. Even among highly acute readers there are those, and they constitute a majority, really, who thought that Strether, at the end of the Ambassadors, rejected Gostrey's overtures to marriage because marriage would interfere with his newfangled freedom and love of life, the "life" he exhorted Little Billham to "live" in the famous book V speech.

A close reading of the diction used by Chad and Gostrey and a slight consideration of the sexual mores of the time easily shows a completely different situation. Strether calls Chad "restless" at the end of section IV of book XII and is returned with the remark that Strether is "exciting". In the very next page, section V, Maria Gostrey says to Strether that he has "excited" her and described herself as "restless".

Gostrey is a courtesan, people. She's a high class whore. She's the same age as Madame de Vionnet, she's single, what's her history? Who is she? Her years of sunshine are running dry. Remember, in section II of book XII Strether calls de Vionnet as looking "old" and compared her crying to the behavior of a "maidservant".

James is calling her pleb, people, a slutty pleb. James is actually very mean sometimes, he's so subtle with his cruelty it's so easy to gloss over. He named a character "Annie Climber" in Portrait of a Lady, which is like Bret Easton Ellis having a character named "Johnny Cokehead". James is very sensitive to names and genealogy and class, he had a notebook full of nothing BUT names.

Today's sexual mores are so unrecognizable from the perspective of the past. The fact that St. Augustine had to justify to the Romans why chastity was a quality of the mind and not the body to excuse the behavior of the raped Christian women of Rome who didn't off themselves after 410 must sound absurd today, and future historians might even question its validity if not for the water tight primary documentation.

And to be a pleb is to be the worst thing possible in the world of James. To fail to be a patrician, ethically or aesthetically, is to be damned. Real scoundrels and criminals don't exist in the world of James, they are simply beyond the pale. It's only too understandable that so many readers find his world stuffy and incomprehensibly boring. By their standards there was no real conflict at all.

>>3504458
Face it, James is falling out of the canon as regards the general readership.

>>3510424
I have a friend who disliked Daisy Miller because he "couldn't relate" to the social conditions a la dating in the novel.

If that ain't pleb as fuck I don't know what is,

>>3511092
>Face it, James is falling out of the canon as regards the general readership.

On the contrary, general readership of the classics is determined by academia and James is not waning in popularity but positively waxing. James never had a popular audience in the first place; his novels sold little in his lifetime and his books were close to out of print immediately after his death. He languished in obscurity for the public and academia--curiously enough he was always popular with poets and novelists and writers in general--until the 1930s and 1940s when the James revival began.

>>3498258
I LOVE Henry James. I first read Portrait of a Lady and was hooked from there. Golden Bowl and Wings of a Dove are both great. What Maisie Knew is divine. I have 'Ghost stories of Henry James' just havent read it yet. I have the Ambassadors and Bostonians havent read those either.

>>3511184

>>3498258
>Harold Bloom
Stopped reading your retarded shitpost right there.

James Franco

>>3498258
I would agree that Henry James is the greatest American writer in the sense that he produced the best work. That said I think that Mark Twain was a more distinctively American writer and had a greater influence on the American canon as a whole. So I suppose it depends on what metric you are utilizing.

Even Harold Bloom admits that Henry James' novels are well made but not as great and original as the novels of Hawthorne, Faulkner, Melville and Pynchon.

I dunno, is it cool to read 300 pages of a chick who can't make up her mind whether or not she wants to stay in an abusive relationship only to finally end up in it? (Portrait of a Lady)

Maybe its cool if you're a flaming homo who likes to imagine how awesome it would be to be a vain, mindless chick.

Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to my Tolstoy and Homer (in original ancient greek)

>>3511882
>gets the plot of the Portrait wrong

> (in original ancient greek)

6/10

>>3512064
> implying James wasn't the worst literary critic

gay

>>3511882
>Even Harold Bloom admits that Henry James' novels are well made but not as great and original as the novels of Hawthorne, Faulkner, Melville and Pynchon.

>Citation needed.

Henry James is gay as hell. I have absolutely no shits to give about trivial woman problems.

If James had lived in the 20th century he would surely have been a transsexual.

>>3512432
He's said it many times. Henry James is incredibly well made but not as strong and influential as Faulkner, Hawthorne, Melville and even Twain's Huck Finn.

I'm pretty sure he also said that The Scarlet Letter was better than Portrait of a Lady.

He's also mentioned that Henry James fanboys are the worst.

>>3512464
This.

Last time I checked Henry James wasn't Marcel Proust.

Last time I checked he didn't have 1/100th of Proust's genius.

>>3512496

>Proust

>American

>>3512482
>He's said it many times
Where?

>>3512507
That guy was responding to OP's point about Proust

>>3512536
>>3512496
Never meant to insinuate that James was better than Proust, merely that it was unfair to judge James with Proust as the standard.

>>3513928
IN that case, all relative judgments are unfair, and we should just read whatever the fuck looks cool

One of the best American writers was Edward Whittemore and his Jerusalem Quartet with its imaginative intensity, magical vision and humour is among the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

>>3515026
>Edward Whittemore
Why is he so underrated?

James sucks.

haha you better believe im bumping this thread

>>3508154
What is the brilliance of Suttree?

>>3508085
>it's terrible

Got that, but I was looking for your reasons why you think that.

>>3517059
Interpersonal relationships are not his thing. The entire father-son thing was sooo vapid and dry. The landscape of the plot was too desolate for him to beautify. He needs the desert and the horizon to spread his poetic wings. Here's a passage of what I deem to be McCarthy at his best:

>The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

The last clause is worth the price of admission really. These gold nuggets are nowhere to be found in The Road.

Henry James is about as American as Giuseppe Rossi.

>>3516516

at first I mad, then I glad

I'd like to thank OP and the rest of /lit/ for maintaining an interesting discussion for the first time in a while.

catcha: literature onLass
I shit you not

>>3517354
the footballer?

>>3517059
Why does this post havea green checkmark next to it?

>>3517437
It's a unicode symbol that he put into his name field.

>>3517453
Thanks anon!

Henry James' critique of George Eliot is like the weak point in his cyber samurai armor. Love HJ, love Eliot, love Zadie Smith, but I'm ride or die for GE and I scoff at the critical words James has for Eliot. <3 William James, though.

Zadie Smith is a wholly unremarkable writer, guys.

This is an excellent thread, but could you please choose your images more carefully, OP?

I only read 4chan via catalog now and so accurate images are paramount. Shocking or unusual images are ignored unless they accrue significant responses, as this thread has done.

With better OP imagery I would have participated in this thread from the start. Please choose your images more carefully in the future and take into consideration catalog viewers.

>>3516078
>Edward Whittemore
>Why is he so underrated?

The reason is the lack of advertising and poor readership. As we can see James, Melville and others are constantly talked about. Unfortunately, Edward Whittemore is absent in literary discussions in spite of being one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century.

>>3517606
You are just a dumbass who don't understand how 4chan work

Raymond Chandler

/thread

Robert E. Howard

Even though he was a pulp writer he was a master storyteller. The action sequences he weaved in his stories can't be topped. R.E. Howard was one of a kind and though he has a slew of imitators not one comes close to the unbridled spirit of the man's stories.

Joe R. Lansdale is perhaps closest to Howard in terms of storytelling.

>>3517614
Tell him, Cletus.

>>3517764

My nigga.

Alright, OP. I don't like James but I like this thread and I like your taste in scandinavian models.

Rank the top 5 James novels...now!

>>3517925
The Golden Bowl
The Wings of the Dove
The Ambassadors
The Portrait of a Lady
The Awkward Age

>>3517925
Ambassadors
Golden Bowl
Awkward Age
Wings of the Dove
Portrait of a Lady

>>3517939
your taste is shit, pleb

>>3517966
But you listed all the same books I did!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>>3517584
But compared to all the other black female writers, she's phenomenal. Can you think of a better black female author, in all of history? I think not.

>>3518007
Toni Morrison at her worst is a million times superior

>>3518007

Zadie Smith isn't terrible, but she's hardly original or groundbreaking in any way. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are both more noteworthy. Maya Angelou too, arguably.

>>3518023

Also, she's not really "black" in the cultural sense that's meaningful when we talk about lit.

>>3518023
Walker and Angelou aren't any better, actually...

>>3518034

"Better" is a subjective weasel word. We can't get very far by arguing using it.

>ctrl+f
>no bukowski

>>3518041
>subjective weasel word. We can't get very far by arguing using it.

lol. They are bad writers.

>>3518007
Octavia Butler.

>>3518401
>science fiction
>Influences
>Harlan Ellison

naaaah

>>3518010
the bluest eye was herp derp

>>3518023
Smith's prose is better.

>>3518032
who cares. Nabokov "was" Russian in a cultural sense either.

>>3518371
P.L.E.B.

>>3518401
mind transplant durp no noes mah chillen

>>3518010
the bluest eye was herp derp

>>3518023
Smith's prose is better. Her characters are deeper.

>>3518032
Who cares. Nabokov wasn't "Russian" in a cultural sense either.

>>3518371
P.L.E.B.

>>3518401
mind transplant durp no noes mah chillen

>>3498258

Are we back in the century of verbose hack writers again? Stop fucking pricking up your own ass OP

>>3519209
Funny thing is, James was never that verbose in his works. Shame there's no pithy epithet for "syntactically abstruse".

gaddis

certainly not fucking pynchon for chrissssakes

>>3519224
Gaddis only wrote one good book though whereas Pynchon wrote like 5

>>3519228

The Recognitions
J R
Carpenter's Gothic
A Frolic of His Own
Agapē Agape
The Rush for Second Place

I count six. And Pynchon has written well over 5 books.

>>3519220

Shame thers no word in a complete small down figure line on the dot which says that you fucking pompus shit cunt whom i hope dies of brain cancer. YOU FUCKING PEICE OF I EWANT TO SMer blood oer you fucking eyes you tosspot baggage

>>3519246
ok

>>3519257
A picture of Henry James, or the cover of one of his books.

>>3519259
Should I just use a common image a la >>3519238

>>3519224

>across smalltite traces and has Nonny put in for a mineral depletion allowance tipped his hand to the FDA coming down hard on cobalt safety levels now Milliken jumps in to protect home industry only thing they had besides sheep and Indians till he suddenly gets the idea his state is

>The title of Gaddis's last novel, "Agape Agape," comes from a tonally arch and intellectually dubious essay that he once wrote about player pianos and mechanization in the arts....an unnamed novelist lies dying, his body a wreck that has betrayed his spirit. He reproaches himself for his failures, denounces the populist "herd" for misunderstanding him, and worries that he's perceived as a mere "cartoon."

>reading Gaddis
>2013

>>3517939
The Awkward Age over What Maisie Knew and Tragic Muse?

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2003/04/wood.htm

Has this thread encouraged you to read more Henry James? Less?

Same question for Faulkner, Melville, Twain, and Pychon, etc.

>>3520026
I'm not an avid fiction reader, but I actually did pick up the Norton Second Critical Edition of Moby Dick today.

>>3520026

I'm going to give Henry James another go, but I read Portrait of a Lady a while back and found it excruciatingly boring. I'll look through some critical work first to get a footing.

William Faulkner.

>>3520010
Enough with the Wood. He is fucking terrible

>>3519304
Sounds interesting, but The Recognitions is the Gaddis most people Recognize as his best

>>3520026
Added five James books to my Amazon wishlist. You convinced me.

>>3520410
What's with all these novelists burning out so quickly in their early 30s? Gaddis, Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, etc.

Also >>3519235 implied that he wrote 6 novels worth reading, not 1.

>>3519228
I don't like Gaddis at all but even I must admit Pynchon only wrote one *great* novel (this should be obvious), and three good ones, and two of those (Vineland and Inherent Vice) will probably be written off by most folks interested in serious mature literature for serious mature people such as themselves. I'll entertain myself by watching folks try and guess the third.

Either way this is all pretty silly, the answer to OP's question won't be determined in our lifetimes. Would I vote for Faulkner is prodded? Sure, but you can easily see him falling out of favor in literary circles. I mean OP's assertion that so many critical essays about James have been written recently ignores that earlier in the 20th century there was a fucking shitton of Faulkner criticism.

I don't know, this is silly, crit is silly, who knows whom history will crown in the end pic related.

>>3521094
Against the Day

>>3521094
Vineland is the only "bad" Pynchon, though even it's still readable, but both GR and M&D are masterpieces..

>>3521094
Um, 3 great novels.
V.
Gravity's Rainbow
Mason & Dixon

1 great novella.
Lot 49

This is my personal opinion, and most of the scholarship I've read on Pynchon seems to share it.

>>3521786
But nobody likes V.

The rest, sure.

>>3521854
V. was pretty good for a first books, in my opinion

>>3521094
>ignores that earlier in the 20th century there was a fucking shitton of Faulkner criticism

The commentary article remarks that Faulkner was #1 the 25 years before, and Faulkner is still #2.

>>3521786
V is great

the rest range between mediocre and legitimately awful

Prose: John Steinbeck
Poetry: T.S Eliot

>>3521094
Vidal's reputation will never wax again. He will disappear.

>>3524979
He was ultimately indeed a Period Piece.

This thread is still around.

>>3528075
i remember this thread

Goddamn, this thread has been here for ages. Die already.

>>3528652
Never!!

b-but Henry James never wrote Varieties of Religious Experience!

>>3530641
tru nuff

There's been a fair number of comments on James novels but has anyone read his short stories extensively? I feel like I'm the only person to have read In the Cage or The Great Condition on /lit/.

>>3532130
His stories are indeed among his greatest works, especially The Beast in the Jungle

>>3532148
It's ironic how people bemoan the ubiquity of short attention spans, yet we consume novels more readily than short stories. It's a kind of proof that habit trumps nature, since short stories are taught less.

>>3528652
If you think this thread will die anytime soon you have another thing coming bud.

This thread still?

c'mon - let this thread die already. US have some good authors, but even the greatest one is half way compared to Europe's averages. Sad but true, sorry Yankee Doodle

>>3534420
>US have some good authors, but even the greatest one is half way compared to Europe's averages.
Take away Dickens and 19th century English literature is a wasteland.

Take away Doestoevsky and Tolstoy and Russia is left with Chekhov and Gogol..

The Germans had nothing until the 20th century.

Compared with individual European nations I think the US comes off rather well in any competition involving the novel.

>>3534434
Do you have any idea how many great authors you have just thrown out the window because of your narrow viewpoint?

Frederick Douglass

>>3534434
This critique is unfair except for the last sentence. The US, in it's very short history of literature, has produced an amazing amount of great writers and writing.

>>3534434

go read your books and return here to tell me how unimportant Paternak and Pushkin are. Compared to individual medium-sized European nation as France US has nothing. So this explains why i'm pissed to see for several days in a row chic lady with a glasses and ape-men playing IMO game glorifying chaps like Hemingway.

>>3534572
>Pushkin and Paternak
>novelists

>>3534434
>Take away Dickens and 19th century English literature is a wasteland.
ummm no

>>3534622
they both wrote reasonably famous novels

>>3534434

>The Germans had nothing until the 20th century.

goethe wrote several classic novels

I don't think we've determined who the greatest is, yet

>>3534434
>The Germans had nothing until the 20th century.
>babby never heard of Effi Briest

>>3498258

No R.L. Stein? I am disapoint.

>>3535644
One should also consider Der grüne Heinrich and Der Nachsommer

>>3535649

>amerijews

>>3534434
>Russia
>no Pouchkine
>no Boulgakov
>trashtalking Gogol
>no Turgeniev
>German had nothing
>Goethe is nothing
>Rilke is nothing
>Holderlin is nothing
>France, Spain and Italy doesn't exist
>Greece never had epics
>Ireland hasn't discovered writting yet
Good one, 8/10

>>3534434
>>3534434
>Take away Dickens and 19th century English literature is a wasteland.
Clearly isn't aware of George Elliot and especially Anthony Trollope.

>Take away Doestoevsky and Tolstoy and Russia is left with Chekhov and Gogol.
>Never mentions Lermontov, Turgenev, Bely, Olesha, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Zoshchenko, Kharms, Pilnyak, Grossman, etc.

>The Germans had nothing until the 20th century.
>Stupidity of this comment speaks for itself.

>Compared with individual European nations I think the US comes off rather well in any competition involving the novel.
>My fucking sides.

Wow. You're one, grade-A jackass, aren't you?

>>3504864

He has a quote about poetry that I absolutely adore.

>There are not that many things to write poetry about. There's love and there's death and time passing and the weather outside

Seconding R.L Stein.

>>3537132
Stephen King called Stein "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."

>>3537150
Haha, he's a fucking shill

James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon, I can't really decide.

>>3537150
Actually, that was Harold Bloom.

>>3498514
>Wallace and Grommet
>
>
>Grommet

>>3537163
Joyce

Talking Pinecone, his good books are Inherent Vice, ATD, and Vineland. It's curious, I invert his books. I want to read V and Slow Learner.

>>3537230
>Talking Pinecone, his good books are Inherent Vice, ATD, and Vineland. It's curious, I invert his books. I want to read V and Slow Learner.
What the fuck does that stream of inane babble even mean? You're the fucking worst, Suncock.

>>3498258
America has two greatest writers, and they are Herman Melville and Thomas Pynchon.

It's ridiculous that anyone would say Steinbeck or Hemingway -- you would only think that if you don't know how to read. Henry James is a good answer, but his novels are basically European.

The answer is Melville and Pynchon.

only read Turn of The Screw. If you say it is a bad rep of Henry then I'll try another, it was a bit drab.

fitzgerald. duh

or mccarthy

>>3537297
>his novels are European
that's why they are good, son.

I can't choose between my favourites,

Delmore Schwartz
T.S. Eliot
Richard Yates
F. Scott Fitzgerald

>>3501683
I alsso agree as far as strong, confident American writing goes my vote is for Steinbeck. Faulkner, while an incredible artist, does not seem to represent America as much to me. Def see Mark Twain in running tho I've only read one or two of his.

>>3537297
>how to read

what am I reading?

My god,

Barely any mention of Jack London.

>>3498258
William Faulkner.

>>3498329

Huh, didn't expect to see you here. I was going to say Faulkner, myself.

>>3537297
What about Twain and Faulkner? They're entirely American, and they're fantastic

>>3537332
>Faulkner, while an incredible artist, does not seem to represent America as much to me.

Why not? Yoknapatawpha County is probably one of the most vivid fictionalizations of the American south I've read about

this thred is stil hyah

o but it ain't bumpin no mo