Greates Prose-stylists of the English Language

>>9719581
Melville, Browne and Burton

>no faulkner
Le trash man

HD
Joyce
Woolf

>>9719607
Don't mention that corn cobbler in a nabby thread

>>9719607
I honestly think McCarthy does what Faulkner does but better.

>1) Vladimir Nabokov (which is interesting, given that English wasn't his first language);
Nabokov was raised with English too, you can't call it a second language
>Honorary English-translation author goes to Friedrich Nietzsche.
What

>>9719631
True. But still he spent more time speaking Russian and even French, and the corpus of the first half of his life was in Russian.

On the second point: Nietzsche is perhaps the single greatest prose stylist of *any* Western language. Not strictly speaking "literature," though his philosophical writings are more literary than most.

None of those are even close though. Nabokov's skills lie in description, alliteration, etc.
Most of his prose would be unremarkable in essay form, for example. If you want great prose writers, you'd read someone like Thomas Browne or Abraham Lincoln

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>>9719581
>mfw my English is quite good yet I read all of those in translation
It's not fair how pretty much any author's prose benefits just from being translated into Spanish

>>9720057
I guess your English isn't so good as you think it is.

>>9720057
just god damn I wish there were pictures of this sluts feet

Nabokov is a tryhard who writes in a tryhard prose style. You can hear him straining to write "great prose" if you bother to focus in on how he actually writes. Faulkner, by contrast, writes effortlessly.

Faulkner unironically name dropped in a discussion about greatest prose stylists? Kek.

Muh corn cobby inbred dialect. Muh literally retarded POV. Effortless like pottery.

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"Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old."

>>9719593
The only correct answer in this thread.

>>9720102
>/lit/

Woolf
Joyce
Gass

>>9719621
McCarthy really is doing a kind of Faulkner impression, isn't he? I never made that connection but it seems obvious now that I think about it.

>>9720717
i've heard that gass's prose is flatulent and overwrought

Mine would be
>author of Beowulf
>Chaucer
>Garner

>>9720558

You're right, if we wanted a genuinely effortless POV of a retard we'd just read the shit that you write.

>>9720730
we're talking prose, chief. get off 4chan and practice your close reading.

>>9720741
Oops, read it as "anastomose virus."

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>>9719621
McCarthy's prose is fun fluff next to Faulkner's fluent lyricism.

>>9719581
Top 3:
1) Faulkner
2) Pynchon
3) Nabokov

Runners up:
4) DeLillo
5) Marilynne Robinson
6) Toni Morrison

>>9720725
It is true.

>>9720778
do you read anything not written in the last 50 years?

Johnson
Emerson
Joyce

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>>9719581
in no specific order
Thomas Browne
Laurence Sterne
(at this moment I realized 3 is far too short)
Henry Miller
Herman Melville
Thomas DeQuincey
Alexander Theroux
Cormac McCarthy

>>9720862
would you like me to list more?

>>9720840
Yes. Virginia Woolf is a favorite. Beyond that, I've only read translations of older works, and this thread pertains prose style, my guy.

1) my
2) diary
3) desu

>>9720901
Yes.

>>9720901
>Ummm
hahahah faggot

>>9720906
That's it buddy. Now I'm going to trace your IP.

>>9720907
You think I'm gay, OP? Well, then. No I'm not gay I'm just a kind person. Doesn't mean I'm effeminate. I like to kill things.

> H.L. Mencken

>>9720914
You a faggot cell kill itself you ducker ugly niece of sh*p

>>9720919
Go away. Go away. GI away. GI away. Duck. GOOOOOOOOOOOO AWAYYYYYYYYHYYYYY 8) u ugly

>>9720915
Good post.
Also
>Cardinal Newman
>Lord Macaulay
>James Branch Cabell
>Abraham Lincoln

>>9720892
prose has been written in english since the 1500's my guy

oh, it's this thread again

>ctrl+F
>"gibbon"
>phrase not found

"patricians" of /lit/

>>9720987
What are some examples?

>>9721022
Thomas More
Philip Sidney

>plot is next-to irrelevant

How to spot a pleb: the thread

>>9720861
Nice list.

>>9721022
thomas nashe is great
anatomy of melancholy
thomas browne as I mentioned
some famous diarists like Evelyn or Pepys

Lawrence Durrell, I cannot recommend him enough

>>9720725
he's a ___big___ guy

>>9719607
Repetitive and pretentious

>>9719612
>HD
Her prose is a disaster
>Woolf
Her work is fucking boring bullshit. The cadences are too often at the expense of sense, and the speed of her sentences are a manneristic trick, the cheap counterfeit of beauty.

>>9719581
Like Updike, his prose is superficially pretty, yet his observations of visual reality are almost always strained and false, which is a defect, considering how much importance Nabokov puts on visual description. He uses a lot of glossy, lurid, overblown language, pretty in itself but completely unfitting for the subject matter at hand.

The real masters of English prose are Herman Melville, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Runners-up are Browne and Burton, Dickens, Austen, and Joyce.

>>9721296
>Like Updike, his prose is superficially pretty, yet his observations of visual reality are almost always strained and false
Absolutely false. They're vivid and true.
>Dickens, Austen
Nothing remarkable about their prose in itself. They're better known for their characters and situations than anything.
>Henry James
Didn't you just censure Updike for false description? James is full of that.

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>>9719581
1.) Salinger
2.) Nabokov
3.) Joyce

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>>9719581
1.) theodore geisel
2.) russell edson
3.) william shakespeare


SUP

>>9720057
You miss lot of stuff with Nabo and obviously with Joyce in Spanish.
Itt. Spanish speaker

>>9721262
Finally, fucking this.