Good call. Magical realism was such an important literary movement. And I agree with you about Hemingway. His short stories are so good it is mostly why I admire his writing so much.
Greatest? What are the metrics? You can't make qualitative judgments with a system. prolific? insightful? impact? highest grossing? most read?
Orwell and Huxley are among the greats Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Walter Mosleys are great to me Rocket River
Most of the black writers that I like (other than Ralph Ellison, who is my favorite writer of all time), aren't novelists. I am a BIG Countee Cullen fan. His poem Heritage is a seminal poem about black identity and art. Also my favorite poem of all time is by a black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar We Wear The Mask. The interesting thing about Cullen is that he is almost the embodiment of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. A lot of black writers of the time were disillusioned by the metered prose of Cullen's art, which had European (namely Keat's) leanings. Most notably, he and Langston Hughes were at odds with each other. Another interesting note that when I was an undergraduate in my African American literature course, my professor took it as a personal slight to blackness (he knew I was a ralph ellison fanatic), and when I told him my paper was going to be about Countee Cullen, he really got bent out of shape about it, as though I should have liked Langston more, but I didn't like Langston at all. Anyway, as far as female black writers my favorite is probably Lorraine Hansberry.
I used to like Faulkner novels, but after reading about 10 of them, which is a lot I am over Faulkner. The only Faulkner novel that I can stomach reading is Go Down, Moses, which is certainly his best written novel (maybe not his most sublime, which would be Absalom Absalom, or his most innovative The Sound and the Fury). Even his short story don't appeal to me, everybody talks about A Rose For Emily, which is probably Faulkner's most read story. The story is plain stupid. A lot of times I just don't get Faulkner. Also, I think that many people LOVE Hemmingway for the wrong reasons, it's how they fantasize and feed the myth, that draws their appeal toward him (about what he DID in his spare time rather than his writing). People hero worship Hunter S. Thompson for the same reason, but give me Joseph Mitchell all day long.
He gets the vote as my favorite. Thanks for starting the thread, I'll be bookmarking and coming back here when I need more books to read.
You say that, but what about henrik ibsen or Chekov. In my opinion, Ibsen is probably the greatest playwright ever, if we are excluding Shakespeare. There is just something about an ibsen play that makes it so appealing.
The interesting thing about Philip K. Dick was that he was kinda a trash writer and nobody really took his work seriously for a lot of years. He kinda willed himself to greatness. If you are into sci-fi, I wonder what you think about kurt vonnegut. Do you place Phillip K. Dick above Vonnegut?
Another book that people may find interesting is In the American Grain by William Carlos William. If you decide to read it though, have a dictionary handy, you're going to need it. Also another writer that I find extremely interesting is Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts. He is a very interesting writer and worth a look up.
No, but consider my moniker. How could I chose anyone else here? I've read an incredible amount of science fiction. Heck, I joined the Science Fiction Book Club in the late 1950's. I have hundreds of novels on my shelves, a large percentage of them science fiction, some that I bought way back then. Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, A.E. van Vogt, Bradbury, Poul Anderson, Sturgeon, James Blish, del Rey, Doc Smith and on and on. Those are just some of the early writers. I love the genre, a genre that has never gotten the credit that it deserves, in my humble opinion.
Well, I don't know. I think sci-fi has certainly got its due. Look at Orwell's 1984. Or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. The problem with most sci-fi novels is that they are written for a certain audience that who was the patience to deal with a lot of bad writing to get to some idea that tickles the fancy of the audience. I have no patience for sci-fi for the same reason that I have no patience for Faulkner anymore, it's because most of these writers are willing to purple up their prose to no end and write reams and reams of backstory that doesn't move the plot forward. The same principle applies to 50 shades of grey. Women are willing to read reams and reams of story because they know eventually that writer is going to provide them a sex scene that is going to curl their toes. The best books of any genre are usually recognized.
