>Andre Gide considered William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett

>>9054066
they're both dead

>>9054066
william faulkner was indeed the greatest american writer

Frenchies love Faulkner.

>>9054066
Faulkner and Melville would be better, but 50% is good.

>>9054066
I think he wanted Faulkner's manletpvcci but would've settled for Hammett's because they kinda look alike.

>>9055134
Wow, they really do.

>>9054580
unless Gide said this as a young boy it'd be impossible for Melville to work.... and Faulkner wouldn't've been alive...

>>9054066

He would be correct. The Glass Key is one of my favorite books, such a pessimistic style of prose. These days he is incredibly underrated.

>They did not leave the corner even that night. They did not walk on loitering nor leave the road. They sat on a sloping grassbank and talked. She talked this time, telling him. It did not take much telling. He could see now what he discovered that he had known all the time: the idle men in the restaurant, with their cigarettes bobbing as they spoke to her in passing, and she going back and forth, constant, downlooking, and abject. Listening to her voice, he seemed to smell the odorreek of all anonymous men above dirt. Her head was a little lowered as she talked, the big hands still on her lap. He could not see, of course. He did not have to see. “I thought you knew,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I reckon I didn’t.”
“I thought you did”
“No,” he said. “I don’t reckon I did.”
Two weeks later he had begun to smoke, squinting his face against the smoke, and he drank too. He would drink at night with Max and Mame and sometimes three or four other men and usually another woman or two, sometimes from the town, but usually strangers who would come in from Memphis and stay a week or a month, as waitresses behind the restaurant counter where the idle men gathered all day. He did not always know their names, but he could cock his hat as they did; during the evenings behind the drawn shades of the diningroom at Max’s he cocked it so and spoke of the waitress to the others, even in her presence, in his loud, drunken, despairing young voice, calling her his whore. Now and then in Max’s car he took her to dances in the country, always careful that McEachern should not hear about it. “I don’t know which he would be madder at,” he told her; “at you or at the dancing.” Once they had to put him to bed, helpless, in the house where he had not even ever dreamed at one time that he could enter. The next morning the waitress drove him out home before daylight so he could get into the house before he was caught. And during the day McEachern watched him with dour and grudging approval.