Who are your favorite writers?  Can you tell us why?

I really like Calvin Trillin.  I think of him as an urbane Dave Barry.

22 responses total.

I'm a big fan of Michael Delizia.  I know he's an electronic more
than a hardcopy writer, but I view that as equally legit.  Whether
it's a poem, a musical critique, a travel note, or a slice of West
Bloomfield life, md's writing is almost always urbane, imaginative,
witty, and/or well-informed, as appropriate.  T'would be no loss
to the New Yorker to replace one of their regular stable of
contributors (Calvin Trillin, for instance) by Mr. D.

  I am a big fan of James A. Michener. His fiction is really believable
and the characters are real (I, am not a Michael Delizia, you'll pardon
me). In Centennial, I was impressed by the spirit of Pasquinel, the 
rebel in Levi Zendt and the sternness of his 4 brothers, the evil that
lurked within Frank Skimmerhorn and the others... the one thing that does
bug me about Michener is his tendency to run on and on. I have become 
accustomed to seeing 1200 page books like The Source and Chesapeake.
  .

[md bows deeply in remmers's direction]

While you have selected some fine authors (*cough*choke*sputter), I prefer
authors with a little more flair.
Try Patrick Nichols who wrote "Gem World".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
To whom it may concern...
The above author does NOT exist!  My point here is that I could choose
any name and any title and pretend that it is real.  Which means that
this conference would simply become a "Name dropping" zone.  It is supposed
to be a Creative Writing conference.  If you want to discuss authors, then
let's DO IT.  Let's discuss their style, their genre, etc.  Perhaps, you
words will sway me to read one their books.

Okay, you asked for it.


FICTION: 

The young Washington Irving - Knickerbocker's History of New York 
in particular.  You can see in it the roots of American humor: the 
relentless teasing, the demented consistency, the solemn lunacy, 
the nothing-is-sacred outrageousness.  Everyone from Mark Twain to 
Doug Kenney and Henry Beard learned from him.  

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Especially his short fiction.  I seem to have 
been reading him all my life.  

Mark Twain - I count most of his nonfiction as fiction.  

Edith Wharton - She did everything well.  She could be evocative, 
sly, ironic, heartbreaking, creepy, hilarious, you name it.  Read 
her stories Xingu, Summer, and Roman Fever, and her novel The Age 
of Innocence.

Jorge Luis Borges - Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.  Pierre Menard, 
Author of the Quixote.  Funes the Memorious.  The Lottery in 
Babylon.  The Secret Miracle.  Borges is like Hawthorne to me.  I 
can't stop rereading him.  He seems less nourishing than Hawthorne, 
more like mind-candy.  If you haven't sampled him yet and want to, 
pick up the New Directions anthology called Labyrinths.  

Vladimir Nabokov - I can't think of another writer who worked 
harder and took more pains to give his readers pleasure.  Three of 
his "American" novels, Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, have been 
judged his greatest work.  His autobiography, Speak, Memory, might 
be the most beautiful book ever written.  

J. D. Salinger - There is a nasty streak of self-righteous smugness 
in him that becomes more apparent on rereading, but he's still, 
well, J. D. Salinger.

John Updike - One of the great short-story writers of all time.  
Some of his novels are first rate, some aren't.  His Henry Bech 
series is great.  

Stephen King - Hey, after all that I'm entitled.  I think he's 
gotten carried away with his own wonderfulness lately.  He rambles 
and drones on messily.  His editor is probably afraid of him.



POETRY:

Geoffrey Chaucer - The Middle English course I took in college was 
far and away my happiest educational experience.

William Shakespeare - Obviously.

Alexander Pope - Bons mots up the wazoo.  The most readable 
"serious" poet.  

William Wordsworth - Instant kindred spirit.  I went "Yes, yes, 
yes" all the way through his stuff when I first read it.  When you 
love a writer that much, you start feeling affection even for the 
crap he wrote, and Wordsworth wrote volumes of crap.  I learned 
later on that this marked me as a typical "Wordsworthian." 

George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron - At his best when he was being 
satirical.  Dazzling.  The "Byronic" stuff is not his best, imho.  

Keats 'n' Shelley - The Debussy 'n' Ravel of English Romantic 
verse, not really all that similar but lumped together by 
tradition.  Keats is the better poet (as Mt. Everest is taller than 
Mt. Makalu), more human and certainly funnier when he wants to be; 
Shelley is more serious, more demanding, more political.  

Matthew Arnold - Of all the countless poets who were influenced and 
inspired by Wordsworth, he was the best.

Walt Whitman - If he's not one of your favorites, too, then there 
must be something wrong with you.  

Robert Frost - Another one I'm always reading.  I never get tired 
of him.

Philip Larkin - Gloomy and depressing, but too good to resist.  

Richard Wilbur - My affection for him comes and goes.  He's written 
some beautiful things, but he has so many mannerisms and 
affectations you just want to throttle him sometimes.  

Robert Bly - See Richard Wilbur.



NONFICTION:

R. W. Emerson - New takes on old problems.  Wisdom, encouragement, 
subtlety.  Read his essay on compensation, for example.  

H. D. Thoreau - Not as original as his most fanatical admirers will 
try and tell you he is, but *such* a good writer he makes every 
idea seem as if you're reading it for the first time.  Plus the 
first Green, plus the father of nonviolent resistence, plus if he 
hadn't lived where would the Sierra Club get quotes for their 
calendars?  

William James - A good writer, very insightful, and such a 
*likeable* guy.  Re Matthew Arnold's comment that those looking for 
"the interesting" won't find it in America, James wrote, "What 
makes Matt so many enemies is the entirely needless priggishness of 
his tone, and his deplorable lapses in judgment.  Imagine setting 
up 'interesting' as an absolute category!" 

Henry James - Yep, him.  I don't like his novels and stories much, 
but he was our best literary critic.  Read his long essay on 
Hawthorne, for example.

John Updike - Yep, him.  He's a better critic than he is a 
novelist, maybe our best living literary critic.  Read *his* long 
essay on Hawthorne, for example.  


This is a snapshot.  If I'd taken the snapshot twenty years ago, 
you might've seen J. R. R. Tolkien and Joyce Carol Oates on the 
fiction list, W. H. Auden and Wallace Stevens on the poetry list, 
and so on.  There are others who could be on the list but aren't, 
either because I don't know any of their works beyond the two or 
three I love (Max Beerbohm, Anne Beattie), or because they didn't 
produce enough to provoke more than a distinct but local affection 
in me (C. S. Calverly), or because I forgot them and won't remember 
them until after I've enter this response.  

[One did not mention remmers because one does not log-roll.]

Matthew Arnold:  "And so I say that, in America, he who craves for
the *interesting* in civilization, he who requires from what surrounds
him satisfaction for his sense of beaity, his sense of elevation, will
feel the sky over his head to be of brass and iron."

William James:  "The trouble about Matthew which sets so many against
him is the entirely needless priggishness of his tone.  His ultimate
heads of classification, too, are lamentable.  Think of 'interesting'
used as an absolute term!"

Oh Michael, I think you just made all those names up. ('cept for mine,
of course)

See now isn't this a much more entertaining item?
I bet Michael has one helluva bookcase!

I assume that's "bookcases" in the plural.

Btw, I note that all of the writers on my "non-fiction" list    
are Harvard men.  There is a *great* temptation to mention
remmers here, but one restrains one's self.  

Geez Michael...didn't you sorta mention Remmers AND restrain yourself?

Would that be an oxymoron or just your garden variety "illogical statement"?

I once knew a person who would read the lines "Whatever it is that
doesn't love a wall / Is having fun with Harvey's Amoco" and say
something like, "You've been influenced by Robert Frost, I see."

Seems reasonable to me ...

ANYONE OUT THERE LOVE CHARLES BUKOWSKI AND HIS
SKEWERED ROMAINTIC VISIONS?
BY FAR THE MOST ENTERTAINING NOVEL I'VE EVER READ IS HIS "POST OFFICE".
AND HIS POEM ON THE BURNING DOWN OF THW L.A PUBLIC LIBRARY COULD HAVE
B
BEEN WRITTEN FOR ME.
BETWEEN HIM ee cummins, HEMMINGWAY,SALLINGER,MARTIN AMIS,
CAMUS AND SARTRE THERE IS NO REASON TO CONTINUE WRITING SUCH IS
THE BREADTH OF THEIR RISK-TAKING AND SUBJECT MATTER.
READ THESE TO SEE YOUR OWN LIFE EXPERIENCES REFLECTED OFF THE PAGE.

i'm a colonial(they forgot to tell my mum's english teacher when 
they left india) dont americans do the fabulous penguin 
publications like gerry durell,james herriot,giovanni gureshi,cyril 
northcote parkinson, the author of "inlaws and outlaws" i forget 
his name.
if all these names sound suspeciously fictional to you, the most 
famous of hte bunch (and least talented, in my opinion) is PG 
wodehouse -HIM you must have heard. 
saki?

Give me Vonnegut, McCaffrey, and Tolkien, I'll be happy forever.

        Isaac Asimov made references to P.G. Wodehose, scout, in the Gold
Science Fiction Collection.  I understand he is a humorist.  Perhaps you want
to try Terry Pratchett as well, who mostly does paradies.
        toking -I can't say I care for McCaffrey or LeGuinn very much.  The
first seems pointless and the second uses many phrases to fit her "lyrical"
style which seem to make no sense.  (Yes, yes, I know most of my phrases don't
make much sense.)  But I do enjoy Tolkien, Terry Goodkind(he's fairly new,
but you should check him out._, Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, and Robert A.
Heinlein.
        Btw: Have they ever come out with a Dune movie that in anyway compares
to the book?

I did enjoy the Dune movie.....but no, I don't think that they have <or
can> come out with a movie that will do Dune any justice.

I think the reason I like McCaffrey is because it is pointless <don't
ask>

Douglas Adams is just helarious <sp>, I've yet to read "Long Dark Tea
Time of the Soul" but I've heard that it is very good.

What sort of stuff does Goodkind write?

Douglas Adams is wonderful :{ ion 100 years they'll still be reading him.
forget anne rice ;} Adams, they'll still be reading, because it is
good ;}

"Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul" is a lot of fun. :) 

Needed a few more *Roman* gods, but still, thoroughly enjoyable.  Dirk Gently
is by far one of his most intriguing characters.
        I think this quote of Terry Goodkind's will become a standard quotation
---"People are stupid.  They'll believe anything either because they want it
to be tru or because they're afraid it might be."

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