/lit/ - Literature

That one guy who wrote the bible.

W.G. Sebald

>>4704812

>popcorn

>>4704801

Marx.

freud

>>4704801
I've always felt that Poe was taken too soon, especially after reading Arthur Gordon Pym and Eureka.

>>4704829
oh, you

;_;

>>4704801
GRRM

Pushkin. Died too early, could have written much more.

William Hope Hodgson

Robert E. Howard and it's not even close.

I sincerely believe he was on the verge of greatness when he offed himself.

So many young authors that died in wars.

>>4704801
Nietzsche of course. I wanted him to confront his announced magnum opus head on with all muh braincancer muh stroke excuses.

>>4704993
*without

>>4704801
tfw somewhere near the devil's visit Dosto writes about Ivan and Katerina, and how he would like to write about them, BUT YOU KNOW HE NEVER WILL, BECAUSE HE DIED JUST AFTER THE BOOK WAS PUBLISHED, holy shit I was more crushed by that part than the Epilogue.

Kafka
Keats

Wittgenstein,

>>4704801
Flannery O'Connor

DFW

>>4707233
I counter-vote to remove 20 years from DFW's life and career.

>>4704801
Douglas Adams

Philip K. Dick, if only because he deserved to see what his legacy would be (he died just before the release of Blade Runner, the first movie of his work).

>>4704982

Howard's friend H.P. Lovecraft also died far too young. Two of the most influential fantasy authors and they both died before they could achieve any significant success.

>>4704801

how can you not say lautreamont ?

>>4707398
>he still would never have seen A Scanner Darkly

>>4707492
Me too

OP, your song is 2 hours long.

Thomas Pynchon

TBH the first thing that came to mind is making sure pynchon lives for another 20, though that's a shit answer.

Probably Robert Musil, I wanna see the man without qualities in it's final form, some suspect he planned it to be as long, if not longer, than In Search of Lost time.

>>4707492
Philisophical Investigations could have been a pure masterpiece in Philisophical thought if it was finished

Anyone of the anti-philosophers: Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche.

Bruno Schulz.

We will never get to read his magnum opus 'The Messiah'. It would've been one of the best books ever written. I k-k-now it.

>>4707665
but the last two sucks compared to everything else he has written.

>>4707492
seconding this

also, Breece D'J Pancake

>>4707662
It is a bunch of small pieces that are 3-5 minutes each.

Julius Evola

>>4707711

Not a song. It has no singing. It is a 'piece.'

Chaucer

>>4707489
you would have to add a few months on top of those 20 years for him to even be able to see minority report

The one and only.

Anne Frank, so I wouldn't need to know about her

>>4707679
This.

>>4707492

This.

This guy, so that he can write the contination of Cezmi. It wouldn't hurt to see him in the political field either, which he would had he livedd close to 20th century.

kant if he was lucid for the whole time.

Basically all of the lyricists of the german expressionism. The best of them being Jakob van Hoddis.

>>4704801
I love me some Chopin,OP has good taste.
Also I guess Dosto or Kafka

>>4708606
If Kafka would have lived longer, we would have gotten even less of his writings, hence his tendency to burn stuff he doesn't like.

Without question, Marlowe. He was almost on par with Shakespeare and unfortunately died at only 29.

Kafka and Proust come in at second and third.

Roger Zelazny. he died because of medical complications for something otherwise trivial. he was just starting to do some interesting work again. dammit.

>>4704982
I would love for Howard to have gotten to meet Tolkien. Tolkien went on record as being a huge fan of the Conan stories.

>>4708606
>Kafka

Why? He wouldn't have finished any of his novels anyway. On the other side, having the half set of his works that was destroyed by the nazis would be delicious.

>>4707219
Wittgenstein had an obsession with his own mortality. I think it's very plausible that the guy would have committed suicide.

Karel Čapek.

Douglas Adams, Phillip Dick, or Franz Kafka.

>>4704801
Dostoevsky is good. I can't think of another writer of that caliber that was still writing at the peak of their powers when they died other than epic poets, and they sort of need to write their epic before they die. Proust and Kafka qualify but they seem to NEED to have died when they did.

>not picking DFW

>>4711158
>implying he didn't destroy his creativity with IJ

>>4707398
I agree that Howard deserved a longer run but Lovecraft? I mean, I love the guy's work but I think 20 more years would have made him contemporary to the second world war. The guy liked hitler to begin with put him near WWll and we get Nazis protecting the world from eldritch horrors and thier jewish servants. As hilarious as that would be to read it would make being a HPL fan kind of wierd.

>>4711241
Didn't he say stuff like black people hatching from eggs?

>>4704801
Probably James Clavell; Gai-Jin could've been a lot better.

>>4711169
>implying the book after Pale King wouldn't be a comeback masterpiece

Ida Pollock.
It will be quite some time before the world gets another chance to read published erotica from the mind of a 125-year-old author.

>>4711258
>implying The Pale King required a comeback

>>4711158
>reading that pretentious, foot-noting piece of hipster garbage

Anyway, William Gaddis. He was picking up speed toward the end of his life (there was only a 9 year gap between Carpenter's Gothic and Frolic), he might have gotten two more books out by now.

>>4711241
someone making full use of their high-school education here.

Firstly, H.P. Lovecraft married a Jew. Secondly, H.P. Lovecraft wasn't so much a racist (people today generally have a pretty 1-dimensional understanding of what historical 'racism' was like) but an Anglophile with a strong Xenophobic streak - he judged everything by its proximity to English and English derived American culture, and strongly disliked anything outside this comfort zone. The idea that he would side with Germany against Britain and America is absurd. Thirdly, Lovecraft was an elitist; he found the Nazis' populism crude to the point of barbaric. He's recorded as saying that while he sympathised with Hitler's dislike of Jews, given that they were a minority community who aggressively refused to assimilate, he found banning Jewish books silly, and ostracising someone otherwise indistinguishable from a pure Aryan simply because of one Jewish grandparent absurd. In general while he admired Nazi patriotism he found them naive and narrow-minded.

I am sure Lovecraft would have made good use of certain Nazis' (Himmler, primarily) pagan cultism. That would have been interesting, had he lived.

>>4711351
How is Gaddis? I really enjoy Pynchon and have started looking into Delillo and McElroy but I don't know much about Gaddis at all.

>>4708791
The Texan pulp-fiction writer and the Oxford Don who specialised in dark age literature? It certainly would have been interesting. Whether they would have got along is another matter.

John Kennedy Toole.
The question is, would we have even heard of him if he didn't off himself?

>>4704801
Nietzsche

I'd like to have known Orwell's position on America, Vietnam and stuff.

the real question is, would you give up 20 years of your life if it meant that whoever you chose would get that 20?

Tolstoy.

He was already really old but I wanted him to experience the 1917 revolution.

Anton Chekov.

>>4712179

Seconded.

>>4704801
Dostoevsky so he could finish his trilogy that started with crime and punishment/

>>4704801
myself

>>4712311
What? You mean The Brothers Karamazov or what?

kafka

if he ever stopped being such a self-conscious pussy and finished the castle that would of saved me the sadness of dat dere mid sentence ending

>>4707492
Oh god yes.

>>4704801
Philip K. Dick

Considering how much of an impact he had after his death and how much his old works apply to contemporary society, I would have loved to see him writing till.. what.. 2012? I wonder what he would think about Google, Facebook, Virtual Realities and all that kind of crap

Christopher Marlowe

>>4712377
>implying philip would have continued writting
>implying he wouldnt be living in the amazon with a tribe doing psychodelics 24/7

Oscar Wilde.

Self inflicted, perhaps, yet still be it an accident, and in the end there are many more such, awaiting us all.

>>4704801
Chaucer. Finish them fuckin tales

>>4712331
or this

Georg Buchner so he could finish Woyzeck