Which writers wrote the best prose ever?

Jane Austen

OP again. I'm always surprised at how little most readers care about prose, like it doesn't matter or something. Of course, some casual readers genuinely can't tell the difference between good prose and abysmal prose...which is worrying.

>>8646779
>the best prose ever
Melville.

Hemingway

>>8646820
/thread

Hemingway

>>8646856
i know hes mainstream, but i gotta agree! heart in the words. makes me cry everytime...him and Dickinson

>>8646779
Pynchon

>implying the opening sentence of Mason & Dixon isn't the greatest in literature

sir thomas browne

>>8646871
>Implying if something is popular, it loses artistic value/merit

Holy shit.. please.. fuck off back to mu you retarded underage faggot.

>>8646878
>Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,-- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,-- the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy December, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.

fucking gibberish, m8

Emily Brontë.

>>8646820
Word

Nabokov

>>8648075
maximum comfy

Rilke, actually.

>>8648094
Why was this not the first post? Is it a meme to pretend like Nabokov isn't a good author on /lit/ nowadays?
>>8646800
I love me some good prose anon, but the vast majority of the west's greatest works were not written in English, which is the only language that most of /lit/ can read. Yet their English translations which (likely) lose quite a bit of the originals overall "feeling" reinforced by their prose manage to persevere on the merits of their ideas and plot structure alone.

>>8648094
i'll 2nd and 3rd that one

Proust or Melville.

>>8646779
Proust.

Dostoevsky

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>And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back he had a full view high up above her knee no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn't ashamed and he wasn't either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn't resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirt-dancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow the cry of a young girl's love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O!O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!

>Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! She glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl. He was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he) stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been. He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don't tell.

>>8648150
Lewd

In french lit, imo : Proust, Céline, Gracq. Huysmans.

(Flaubert still the GOAT novelist)

>>8648150
That first sentence went on a little bit too long.

German lit: Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Bernhard

>>8646779
Hegel :^)

>>8647419
This is actually a rather popular choice

John Cowper Powys

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Absolutely Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Maximum feels with minimal words.

>>8649359
Wow, upboated! :)

>>8649375
Did you read the OP, surprised anyone took this seriously