Favorite Authors

[Blackjack]

Oh easy...
1. Mark Twain
2. Poe
3. Louis L'Amour
4. Ian Fleming
5. Raymond Chandler

 

[filfoster]

Phillip Kerr

 

[Hunter_aka_Scotty]

1. JRR Tolkien
2. Edgar Allan Poe
3. Edmund Burt
4. Terry Goodkind
5. Harry Turtledove

 

[BriarWolf]

In no particular order...

Robert E. Howard
H.P. Lovecraft
Edgar Rice Burroughs
P.G. Wodehouse

 

[Historyteach24]

Jean shepherd
Bernard cornwell
Steven saylor
Homer hickam
Poe

 

[cw3pa]

Dorothy L. Sayers
Craig Johnson
Bernard Cornwell
P.G. Wodehouse
George MacDonald Fraser
S.S. Van Dine

 

[babygirl...]

William P. Young,(The Shack) just to name one..too many to count..I love reading anything that doesn't have a bazillion personal opinions and drawn out drama..:eusa_doh:

 

[Bugguy]

Harry Harrison - Sci Fi writer passed in August 2012. I own a copy of almost everything he wrote.

Notable (sci fi'ers) was Soylent Green (Movie) from Make Room, Make Room
Deathworld Trilogy
Stainless Steel Rat
Bill, the Galatic Hero

I have much of his work in the original Astounding, Galaxy, or Fantsy & Science Fiction pulp magazine format.

 

[Guttersnipe]

For classical literature: Emile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Guy de Maupassant, Mikhail Bulgakov, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway (short stories), Raymond Chandler, Leo Tolstoy (short stories), must read more classical literature...

Cotemporary fiction: Michael Moorecock, Alan Furst, James Ellroy, must be some others here... do not read much contemporary fiction...

Philosophy, strategy, non-fiction etc: Raymond Aron, Carl von Clausewitz, Niccolo Machiavelli, Charles de Gaulle, Raoul Castex, Andre Beaufre, Ramachandra Guha, Robert Jervis, Thomas Schelling, Richard Betts, Lawrence Freedman, Rajesh Bashrur, Amartya Sen, Stephen Walt, Daniel Drezner, Stephen van Evera, and too many others...

I'm glad to see someone else appreciates Alan Furst around here. A friend turned me onto the Night Soldiers series of novels recently and I'm hooked. So far I've only read the first three. Growing up with a history professor father who specializes in Russian history 1850-1950, it's like these book are tailor made for me!

For classical lit: Hemingway, Orwell (especially beyond the "big two" works), Camus, Kerouac, and Kafka have been my consistent favorites over the years.

For fiction, both classic and modern: Alan Furst, James Ellory, Raymond Chandler (you and I think alike, Chassuer), Patrick O'Brian, Michael Shaara, Irvine Welsh, and Bernard Cornwall (a guilty pleasure).

For non-fiction/history: James McPherson, Bruce Catton, Simon Sebag Montefiore (his biographies of Stalin are considered unmatched), Paul Preston, Antony Beevor.

 

[PT Monteith]

Ira Levin
Kurt Vonnegut
Raymond Chandler
Henry Miller
Marcel Proust
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dashiell Hammett
Mark Twain
Richard Brautigan
Yukio Mishima

There's too many.

 

[Antje]

I have to put jane austen on my list, and Albert payson terhune!!!!

Verstuurd van mijn ST18i met Tapatalk

 

[ChiTownScion]

James T. Farrell
Sinclair Lewis
Mordecai Richler
Bruce Catton
Shelby Foote
Wiley Sword
Douglas Southall Freeman
Rudyard Kipling
Frank McCourt

And many others.

 

[skydog757]

Mark Twain - Is to literature as The Beatles are to pop/rock music. They're so great it's almost unfair to compare them to others.

Truman Capote - Really worked on the craft of writing. Debatably created the "nonfiction novel" with In Cold Blood.

Elmore Leonard - Great ear for dialoge and his character's thought process.

Ken Kesey - Not prolific, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion are true art.

Mike Royko - Mostly a column writer; great observer of the human condition and funny as hell. Try writing a great column every day.

There's many more, but these leap to mind.

 

[Blackthorn]

Jack London is at the top, but also Mark Twain and A. Conan Doyle.

 

[Harp]

Mike Royko - Mostly a column writer; great observer of the human condition and funny as hell...

I met him once. An original, and one of the last of the old school reporters.

 

[Benzadmiral]

. . .

Truman Capote - Really worked on the craft of writing. Debatably created the "nonfiction novel" with In Cold Blood.

Elmore Leonard - Great ear for dialoge and his character's thought process. . . .

Capote was quoted as saying that he loved writing as a youth. Then, he said, "I discovered the difference between bad writing and good writing. And then I discovered the difference between good writing and great writing -- and the whip came down!"

As for Leonard, people today know him from his crime novels, especially those which have been made into movies ("Get Shorty," "The Big Bounce," "Mr. Majestyk," "Fifty-Two Pickup"). But his Westerns were dynamite: "Hombre," the short story that became "3:10 to Yuma," and more.

Which reminds me of Loren D. Estleman of Michigan. He writes crime and private-eye novels, historical novels about Detroit at various eras, grand Westerns (The High Rocks, White Desert), and -- get this -- well-received pastiches of Sherlock Holmes. His first published novel was Sherlock Holmes Vs. Dracula!

 

[tropicalbob]

Jorge Luis Borges. I once hitchhiked from New Jersey to Maine in the wintertime because my professor told me she would introduce me to him if I came (she knew him from Argentina). I asked him what he thought of the French writer Robbe-Grillet, and he laughed and said, "It's all part of the same dream." I never forgot that.

 

[GoetzManor]

Wow, after reading some of the names on here, I'm embarassed to say that mine is Kerouac. The imagery, man. The imagery! Although I think it's becoming trendy to like that era of writing; Kerouac, Ginsberg and the like, but to some people, when I bring up On the Road, they can only acknowledge the film.

 

[Harp]

Jorge Luis Borges. I once hitchhiked from New Jersey to Maine in the wintertime because my professor told me she would introduce me to him...

I envy you this moment with Borges. :coffee:

 

[Harp]

Although I think it's becoming trendy to like that era of writing; Kerouac, Ginsberg and the like...

Kerouac and Burroughs are overplayed jokers-the latter all the more tragically so, but their insipid production amounts to little.
K should have stayed at Columbia and seen an Ivy League education through or stayed the course during WWII, perhaps his psyche
was too fragile, and I do not necessarily fault him for this lapse; rather he seems deformed in mind and spirit. Immature but talented,
skewered in perspective. On The Road is clearly a man in search of self but puerile overall.
Burroughs' Naked Lunch was cannibalized for Junkie, and to its credit affords an historical snapshot of Mexico and addiction.
A sorry son-of-a-bitch born with a silver spoon in his hand and another shoved up his ass.

Ginz and Ferli are credible, but the entire chapter remains a frayed soul....

sorry for the rant