Who's the best author of all time?

[Anonymous No.12168703]

In terms of plot, description, character development, etc.

[Anonymous No.12168706]

>>12168703
Not Dosto, for fucks sake.

[Anonymous No.12168714]

>>12168706
Agreed. Camus maybe?

[Anonymous No.12168723]

>>12168703
me

[Anonymous No.12168724]

>>12168714
No way. Plot? Non-existent. Character? Non-existent.

[Anonymous No.12168735]

>>12168724
He didn't need to.

[Anonymous No.12168739]

>>12168735
Like that's an argument.

[Anonymous No.12168740]

You know its true. Perfect pacing, perfect plotting, perfect prose, perfect characters.

[Anonymous No.12168749]

>>12168740
Ma boi.

[Anonymous No.12169527]

>>12168703
homer.

[Anonymous No.12169726]

Stendhal

[Anonymous No.12169733]

>>12168703
David Foster Wallace or Pynchon.

[Anonymous No.12169870]

Guimarães Rosa.

[Anonymous No.12169876]

>>12168740
Based Whitman poster

[Anonymous No.12169878]

>>12168703
steinbeck

[Anonymous No.12169895]

>>12168740
Agreed. Reading nothing but Tolstoy for a month almost killed my enjoyment of other literature

[Anonymous No.12169904]

Shakespeare and Tolstoy

[Anonymous No.12170197]

>>12168740
>Perfect pacing, perfect plotting, perfect prose, perfect characters.
Reminds me of a time in around 2006 or so when some journalist asked Nadal if he thought Federer had any weaknesses. Rafa looked pretty sheepish and said something like 'Well I think his backhand is perfect. His forehand, that is perfect too. He has a perfect serve. His movement around the court is perfect...'

[Anonymous No.12170213]

>>12168723
unironically this guy

[Anonymous No.12170234]

>>12168703
I love American lit and have a huge bias to it, but for fucks sake, DFW, Pynchon, and Steinbeck? Steinbeck is probably my favorite, but god no, he is not the best. Like it or not, plebs, but it's probably Shakespeare. I could see the argument for a few others (Tolstoy, Melville, Virgil, hell, maybe even Faulkner) but y'all got it fucked up.

[Anonymous No.12171431]

>>12168714

I hope this is bait.

[Anonymous No.12171457]

>>12168706

[Anonymous No.12171470]

>>12168714

[Anonymous No.12172734]

>>12169895
> almost killed my enjoyment of other literature
agreed. My professor told me he was the best writer ever. I agreed with him then started to rad Tolstoy works. After that I quited the major.

[Anonymous No.12172857]

>>12168703
God

[Anonymous No.12172930]

Hard question to answer... Shakespeare is the most important writer in our Canon, and my favourite writer, but the best? To compare his plays to a later work, like say Moby-Dick, is like comparing apples and oranges.

[Anonymous No.12172961]

Homer and Sheikh Pier

[Anonymous No.12172996]

>>12172930
so do you prefer apples or oranges anon?

[Anonymous No.12173011]

>>12172930
Shakespeare is a meme.

[Anonymous No.12173068]

>>12173011
>Shakespeare is a meme
Invented by Bacon...
;-)

[Anonymous No.12173102]

>>12172996
Depends on my mood! Shakespeare, whoever he was, is an endless source of joy. Moby-Dick has a haunting power which in part derives from, is informed by Shakespeare. The most under rated writers in English are probably P.G. Wodehouse and, when at his best, Jack Vance. Wodehouse especially was a master stylist. But in a certain sense the foundation of it all are The Plays.

[Anonymous No.12173152]

>>12173068
wrong. It has to be Marlowe.

[Anonymous No.12173161]

For me, it's Jane Austen.

[Anonymous No.12173313]

>>12173152
Marlowe fucking died before many of Shakespeare’s plays were even written

[Anonymous No.12173330]

>>12173313
Well Shakespeare was the literary executor of Marlowe's estate so...

[Anonymous No.12173573]

>>12173330
This could be true, but much of Marlowe’s writing is pretty milquetoast. Why the fuck did he not stage these plays in his own lifetime?

[Anonymous No.12173601]

>>12169904
Yep

[Anonymous No.12173628]

>>12173573
Why does everyone overlook ben jonsons accounts when theyre freaking out over how little record there is of shakespeare

[Anonymous No.12174892]

Has to be Herman Melville. His writing has this incredible passion behind it that sounds like it’s being written in this almost stream of consciousness flurry in terms of the sentence structure and how well everything flows, but somehow every single word choice and description is absolutely perfect, to the point where I have to imagine that he either poured over every single sentence for hours getting them just right, or he had the best instincts of any author I’ve ever read. And he’s more than just the guy who wrote Moby-Dick. I think The Confidence Man is as good as Moby-Dick, while managing to feel completely different. If you loved the denser parts of Moby-Dick as well as its humor, you’d love The Confidence Man. His short stories are phenomenal as well, plus Mardi and Pierre are great and very much worth reading.

Also I’m not sure when or why it became cool to shit on Dostoevsky but it makes me sad. He’s one of my favourite writers as well, whereas I always found Tolstoy pretty overrated.

[Anonymous No.12175959]

>>12168703
>OP believes there is a best author of all time
kek

[Anonymous No.12177110]

>>12174892
>I always found Tolstoy pretty overrated.

I hear way more about Dostoevsky than Tolstoy. I personally prefer Tolstoy although I like both

[Anonymous No.12177127]

>>12174892
i loved moby dick, i'll pick up the confidence man. which short stories by him would you recommend?

[Anonymous No.12177761]

>>12177127
Enjoy, The Confidence Man can be a bit of a mindfuck. The absolute essential would be Billy Budd, which is probably more of a novella considering its length, but it’s a masterpiece. Beyond that my personal favourites/recommendations would be Benito Cereno, The Encantadas, and Bartleby the Scrivener, though I’ve never read one from him I haven’t enjoyed. Almost every publisher who has released some of Melville’s work has released a collection of his short stories, usually called “Billy Budd and other short works” or something like that, and all those stories I mentioned will be in there. So just grab one of those from Penguin or Oxford World Classics and you’re set.

[Anonymous No.12178198]

Time will reveal to you the fact that I am correct

[Anonymous No.12178206]

>>12168703
John Milton for epic and Tolstoy for novel.

[Anonymous No.12178260]

>>12174892
i had to read confidence man in high school and found it boring as hell. all we did was examine the historical contexts and the references he was making. the writing was nice but i had no interest in all the vignettes. i hated the doctor one.

i loved moby dick though, will probably pick up mardi/pierre if you really think they are worth it.

[Anonymous No.12178275]

>>12168703
Probably Shakespeare or Joyce, I think Pynchon and Aeschylus are more enjoyable to read but they're really not on the same power level as the first pair. There is a very narrow range of actually genius literature in existence, just as there are only a few composers who are worth studying or lauding endlessly. Art is not a field of parity and variegated olympian talents, everyone converges towards similar styles, similar attempts at dominating their field and eventually just a half dozen or so names emerge which are so much more potent than their talented peers you'd have to be demonstrably low iq to not notice the superiority. Chasm between Joyce and Borges or Celine or Stendhal, Gogol, Nabokov is incredibly obvious.

[Anonymous No.12178298]

>>12178275
>Chasm between [English writer] and [French, Russian, Spanish writers] is incredibly obvious.
LMAO. Sorry but having one great work does not put you on the same planet as Shakespeare

[Anonymous No.12178301]

>>12168723
Your greatest masterpice was your diary desu

[Anonymous No.12178308]

>>12170234
So Nabokov gets btfo?

[Anonymous No.12178537]

>>12168714
dude I love Camus, but he's definitely not the GOAT author

[Anonymous No.12178543]

>>12168703

[Anonymous No.12178552]

>>12168703

I feel like this is a foolishly pointless discussion. You know art is subjective, right?

[Anonymous No.12178611]

>>12168703
Honestly Stephen King. I know I'll get shit for that but he's super good at character development and plots. His prose is very unique as well.

[Anonymous No.12178983]

>>12168740
Agreed, except for perfect pacing.

[Anonymous No.12178999]

Conrad

[Anonymous No.12179025]

>>12168703
Stefany Myeers
JK Rowling
Emely Bronty
Mary Shelley

they are the best

[Anonymous No.12179030]

>12179025
you're so fucking unfunny

[Anonymous No.12179449]

Paulo Coelho

[Anonymous No.12179633]

>>12169904
>Shakespeare and Tolstoy

This.


Tolstoy is the greatest novelist of all time and one of the greatest short story writers. He is a master of the pure and crystalline realistic prose, and his characters are generally perfect as representations of how human beings really are. He constructs them with small touches, patiently, again and again and again, and in the end you really feel like here it is a fellow who was really perceptive of others around him, and who studied himself with so much surgical fanaticism that he always knew how he would react in a given situation if he was a person with such and such tastes and characteristics.

Shakespeare is the greatest master of language of all time, the greatest of all poets, and his characters are examples of what human beings would be like if they knew how to expose their thoughts and feelings on the language of the angels. They are not realistic, but more like the figures on the frescoes of Michelangelo.

[Anonymous No.12179710]

>>12179633
I agree with you, though calling Shakespeare the greatest of all poets? What about Robert Browning, His dramatic monologues rival Shakespeares poetry.

[Anonymous No.12179768]

>>12168703

[Anonymous No.12180083]

>>12168703
Shakespeare and you're delusional if you think anything else. Honorable mentions are Joyce, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Borges.

[Anonymous No.12180406]

>>12178260
If you didn't like The Confidence Man I'm not sure that you'd like Mardi much either, it has a similar sort of feel at times. Not exactly the same, but it has a lot of little vignettes in a similar style. But you might be more into Pierre which is different and really damn weird in its own way. And definitely check out his shorter stories if you haven't already.

[Anonymous No.12181349]

>>12168703
Tostoï and War and Peace is the best novel ever written, there is no other valid anwser.

[Anonymous No.12181358]

>>12180083

Borges? What? His whole career sprang from one Kafka story: The Great Wall of China. My Russles are Jimmied.

[Anonymous No.12181378]

>>12179768
Based and Jamespilled

[Anonymous No.12181655]

>>12168703
WOLPHRAM VON ESENBACH. BASED BASED BASED BASED ATTENTION BASED

[Anonymous No.12181751]

Shakespeare you fucking retards. He literally invented me. Take it up with Harold Bloom.

[Anonymous No.12182011]

>>12168703
Cervantes
>>12168714
cringe

[Anonymous No.12182037]

>>12170213
what is his best work?

[Anonymous No.12182049]

>>12181751
Honestly Shakes is GOAT, but plot is not his strong suit.

Like a cross dressing bitty could hijack legal proceedings in Venice of any age.

[Anonymous No.12183178]

Theodor Fontane non-negotiable

[Anonymous No.12183182]

Rick Riordan

[Anonymous No.12183210]

>>12179633
>He is a master of the pure and crystalline realistic prose
how can you know this only having read him in english translation?

[Anonymous No.12183231]

>>12173313
There are ways around that, anon, cf. Peter Farey...
http://themarlowestudies.org/essay-farey.html

[Anonymous No.12183242]

>>12168703
Dostoevsky for sure.

[Anonymous No.12183244]

>>12179025
LOL

[Anonymous No.12183278]

>>12182011
Bacon was Cervantes...

[Anonymous No.12183563]

>>12169876

[Anonymous No.12184143]

>>12168723
Based

[Anonymous No.12184160]

>>12182037
(You)

[Anonymous No.12184545]

>>12168703
I am a pleb from /lit/ POV and read fantasy almost whole my life so only genre I can reference is fantasy
imo Joe Abercrombie's First Law is the one
his character development is through the roof, has lots of meaningful dialougues, environment description satisfies Churchill's quote about good speech compared to girl's dress: "Short enough to create interest and long enough to cover the subject"
plotwise he did a tremendous job with worldbuilding and it is flawless overall

[Anonymous No.12184656]

>>12184545
Next First Law trilogy is done now. First book out around September next year.

[Anonymous No.12185251]

There isn't a single answer for this, and anyone that says "it's X" is an idiotic brainlet.

[Anonymous No.12185290]

Melville? Anglos are a fucking joke, he have 1 great romance, all the other works a far inferior. Now for the right choices:

-Virgil
-Tolstoy
-Shakespeare
-Dante
-Cervantes

That's it, you can't choose only one, unless you have a severe lack of knowledge

[Anonymous No.12185300]

>>12168703
>plot
>character development
This means nothing

[Anonymous No.12185401]

>>12185290
>, he have 1 great romance, all the other works a far inferior.

And yet you inserted Cervantes on your list

[Anonymous No.12185420]

>>12179768
Pedo

[Anonymous No.12185668]

>>12185401
>he thinks Moby Dick is in the same level as Dom Quixote
>he've never read Cervantes's novelas

...americans

[Anonymous No.12185695]

>>12168703
Here you go
>>12168714
Ebin

[Anonymous No.12185709]

>>12168703
Here you go
>>12168714
Ebin

[Anonymous No.12187392]

>>12173313
>"Died" from a stab wound to the head less than two weeks after a warrant for his arrest was issued
>The witnesses: Ingram Frizer, Robert Foley, and Nicholas Speres; a conman, a spy, and a conman spy
>All 3 worked for the Walsingham, the Queen's spymaster
>The coroner of the Queen's household illegally intervened in the inquest
>Frizer was pardoned and Marlowe buried in an unmarked grave
>Shakespeare and Marlowe were both bisexual catholics or atheists with catholic sympathies, born two months apart
>The name Shakespeare is an obvious reference to the only english pope, Nicholas Breakspeare
>None of Shakespeare's works enter official record until after Marlowe's death
>Shakespeare's early writing style almost identical to Marlowe's
>Falsely presumed death appears 33 times in Shakespeare's works
>Shakespeare's epitaph easily rearranged to form a verse referencing both Marlowe and Shakespeare by name, with perfect meter and rhyme

[Anonymous No.12188582]

>>12168740
Tolstoy rules. But you know, he did tend to get into these rants sometimes... it really hurt his later stuff. Flaubert was more nearly _perfect_.

[Anonymous No.12188607]

>>12169904
Shakespeare ate shit. Ridiculous characters doing absurd things, impossible dialogue no one ever spoke in their lives, gory murders, stupid unfunny jokes. Tolstoy and Shaw despised him, and rightly so. Some good lines of poetry here and there, OK, but as a storyteller he isn't worth a nickel.

[Anonymous No.12188624]

>>12179025
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

kys.

[Anonymous No.12188757]

>>12179633
>Tolstoy is the greatest novelist of all time and one of the greatest short story writers. He is a master of the pure and crystalline realistic prose, and his characters are generally perfect as representations of how human beings really are. He constructs them with small touches, patiently, again and again and again, and in the end you really feel like here it is a fellow who was really perceptive of others around him, and who studied himself with so much surgical fanaticism that he always knew how he would react in a given situation if he was a person with such and such tastes and characteristics.
And that's why he will be forever inferior to Dostoevsky.
Tolstoy's characters are how they should be in a desired context and no rational person can dispute his perfect constructs.
Dostoevsky's characters, on the other hands, are crystallized humanity. They are so pure that they are not conceivable for those attuned to life. But their humanity is so compelling that readers are convinced that they must exist. And in this form they can address the issues that touch the heart of man- issues the real man is not true enough to face. You can dispute that no one behaves like Dostoevsky's characters in real life and therefore they are "unrealistic." But deep in your heart is the envy for their truth.

[Anonymous No.12188785]

>>12168740
Agreed. Even his more tendentious works, such as Resurrection, are some of the best works of literature I've read.

[Anonymous No.12189266]

>>12178308
Nabokov is the shit

[Anonymous No.12189619]

>>12168703
Unironically? Me. Id post an excerpt from my novel if I wasn't afraid on its effects in the future once its actually published. All of you will be ashamed of your words and deeds. The erotica I wrote on my second language and never edited or revised is better written than anything you people can whip up

[Anonymous No.12189648]

God is the Great Author.

[Anonymous No.12189665]

>>12168703
Shakespeare's the best writer ever and nobody comes close.

[Anonymous No.12189686]

>>12188757
While i feel like dosto is a bit of a self insert whore, i like this take alot

[Anonymous No.12189714]

>>12168703
how long is all time, if time is an illusion? Theres no such thing as a best author of all time. Therefore, the question should be, Who is the best author at this very moment. and his name is Proust.

[Anonymous No.12189827]

>>12179633
Definitely not one of the greatest short story writers. You can find pages of beautiful passages in his longer work, but when he tries his hand at compressing his ideas into a few pages his writing becomes almost banal. Chekhov is far superior to him in this regard.

[Anonymous No.12190371]

>>12185668

I’m with Nabokov on the view about Cervantes. Problem with Spaniards is that they judge with a patriotic lens to often, not a very healthy thing to do.

Also, there are other works by Melville other than Moby Dick. Cervantes might have other works, but nobody actually reads them (people don’t even read Dom Quixote anymore: the character is more present as a cultural symbol than as something that people actually discover by reading the book).

And I’m not American.

[Anonymous No.12190469]

>>12188757
>Dostoevsky's characters, on the other hands, are crystallized humanity. They are so pure that they are not conceivable for those attuned to life. But their humanity is so compelling that readers are convinced that they must exist

To me they generally tend to use more monologues when they speak and are often portrayed with caricature-like traces, peppered with many convulsions, fevers, nervous-breakdowns and ticks. It gives the illusion of depth and profundity, the illusion that one is coming near the marrow of the soul and the primeval roots of being. It’s somewhat similar as asking a child what is the better character: Batman or Holden Caulfield. The child will certainly choose Batman, because his exaggerated traits and super-hero qualities are far more appellative, far easier to understand than the subtleties of a real-life portrayal of a teenager.

Exaggerated characters are far easier to write than realistic ones. The careful observation of real people and the knowledge of real life acquired throw experience is not that easy to achieve, especially if you want your fiction to be varied and deal with several different subjects, scenes and atmospheres.

And it doesn’t help that Dostoyevsky don’t have any of Shakespeare’s poetic capacities (that make his exaggerated characters far more interesting, since they speak like angels would speak if they existed), but only a very dry and sloppy kind of prose.

I firmly believe that anyone who thinks that Dostoyevsky is superior to Tolstoy or Chekov is a) either a person who doesn’t write or never tried to write seriously or b) a person who feels to be more similar to Dostoyevsky in his/her writing (since is far easier to write like him: careless construction, forced exaggerations, the lazy “invention” of “people” instead of the difficult work to really know people) and thus feel the need to champion him (and by doing so to champion his/her self)

[Anonymous No.12191160]

>>12190469
You can try and write a fictional character with exaggerate traits and people would call you out for it, because based on your analysis I know sure for that you don't have the talent to construct a character that "must exist."

You see. Those characters that you revere are in a sense easy to contruct: you've known them you've met them or you've heard of them. Their traits have the right permutations that are familiar to everyone. This familiarity and artistry on the writer part are what make them "real." It is really formulaic in the sense that you just need to observe then practice as you have put it.
Essentially, what Tolsoy and similar writers were doing was putting "real" people in fictional setting and reporting their behaviors. So as a reader, you may or may not see yourself in those situation. But the important thing is you can identify with those characters, which create excitement and engagement. There is nothing wrong with that. But I would argue that what made their art stand out was not the characters but the fictional settings they created, and that their characters were plagiarized from real life.

And here is why Dostoevsky was a genius. His "exaggerated" characters were not created by picking a permutation of traits that were familiar to readers then making them behave in a way that was not familiar. He created his characters by picking obscure permutations yet their behaviors were pure humanity or "familiar." He made them familiar by his keen observation and knowledge of each trait in his chosen permutation. And this mastery resulted in readers' engagement because they have seen those individual traits before, just not in that combination, but it was his genius and knowledge that made those traits manifest true to the heart of man.

So you see, Tolstoy and the like created settings then stole real life characters to run it. Dostoevsky created both. And that is, again, why he is superior.

[Anonymous No.12191261]

>>12189619
based Anon

[Anonymous No.12191271]

>>12178611
not sure about that, id say either neil gaiman or george r. r. martin

[Anonymous No.12191284]

Because it's Independence Day, I'll say Väinö Linna. Read pic related.
>plot
regular machine gun company made of normal men who fight through Continuity War
>description
extremely good realism
>characters & development
best ever to be written down in ink, used to this day as prime examples of several multi-layered archetypes in universities and officer school

[Anonymous No.12191293]

>>12183182
false. john greene.

[Anonymous No.12191303]

>>12168703
He'll be born in the next thousand years.