Favourite Authors

I know we already have a book thread floating around in the darker regions of Foot, but what about authors? I consider Gabriel Garcia Marquez very capable of writing a good book for instance, but I don't consider him a great author, ditto Murakami Haruki and Brett Easton Ellis. I also enjoy books by people like Tim Parks, Jack Kerouac and Michael Herr, but for some reason don't list them as great authors when asked, so I'm interested in who other people think are/aren't great authors.

For me the two most significant authors of last century were George Orwell and Charles Bukowski, both for different reasons. Bukowski I feel showed the underside to America, and western life perfectly in Post Office, Women and Factotum, along with his short stories and poems. I think he showed us the neglected lives of Americans better than anyone had before, or has since, including William Burroughs (who I also think is a great author). Mainly I prefer Bukowski over Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg etc. because I find his stories more based in reality, I don't think he hides anything from us. When he hits a woman for not getting out of his way he tells you that, when he can't get an erection because of how much he has drank he includes it, and when he gets the hell beat of him he doesn't try to make himself seem any more manly than a guy who got drunk, mouthed off and get beat up. Ginsberg and Burroughs sometimes let the ideas they wanted to get across get in the way of their work, especially in their latter years (I've always thought Junky to be Burroughs best novel), and Kerouac tries to hard to make himself look cool.

As for Orwell, well all those soundbites that say that no-one has documented the 20th century better than Orwell are true in my opinion. When you look at Animal Farm and 1984 and realise that he wrote about these things prior to them happening you see the foresight the guy had. Couple that with his honest looks at life in the working class (Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London) and the Spanish Civil War (Homage to Catalonia) and you get a good picture of how talented this guy was.

Other than that I'd throw Hunter Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, PJ O'Rourke, and William Burroughs names into the great author hat

Irvine Welsh

Robert Harris

Not as well read these days as I might be. I used very much enjoy Stephen King books when I was younger. Much better books than most of the (straight to video/TV) movies that have been made of them.

The last three books I've read have all been by Richard Dawkins and they've all been great.

Joseph O'Connor
Robert Harris
Le Carre
David Mitchell
Charles Cummings

Five authors I keep an eye on in terms of new literature.

Charles Dickens - simply the greatest of all time. (and source of my signature)

John Steinbeck - A personal favourite.

Henry Fielding - a great satirist.

John Irving - a future Nobel prize winner.

George Orwell - a visionary.

Author Ashe.:D

J.D. Salinger
Tom Clancy

Bill Bryson, Brett Easton Ellis, Stephen King.

That's about it really.

george orwell..

Nick Cave

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Thomas Pynchon
Stanislaw Lem

Only author I consistently read is Nick Hornby. High Fidelity being probably my favourite book

Interesting on the Orwell / Marquez issue. Orwell is one of the very few 20th Century authors whos works I would make a point of trying to salvage for the future, but I would consider him rather a great thinker more than a great writer. Meanwhile, Marquez, while less significant in terms of a vision of the world, or a political standpoint, is a better writer, and in terms of his embrace of what it is to be human, possibly a great.

Personally, some great authors who come to mind in no particular order would be:
Melville
Dickens
Shakespeare
Kafka
Marquez
Mishima
Austen
Lewis Carroll
Swift
Gogol

Plenty of others that I really love, like Nathaniel Hawthorn, Grahame Green, Philip Roth, but that I wouldn't rate as being the true greats.

John King - The Football Factory, HeadHunters, England Away

Hunter S. Thompson
J.D Salinger
Leon Uris
Iain Banks - Wrote "The Wasp Factory"

William Peter Blatty - "The Exorcist" a brilliantly written book that is wrongly overshadowed by the Film. Gripping from page 1.

love John Pilger and Noam Chomsky..

Anyone ever read 'Marching powder' abook about the notorious san pedro prsion in la paz...quality!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by citizenerased

Noam Chomsky.

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Would you really consider him a great author?

He is writing about very important stuff, but his presentation style leaves a lot to be desired, and his use of quotations combined with footnotes is diabolical, and dare I say it, deliberately misleading.

Ian rankin. if you like detective fiction then you are a lucky git if you havent read any of his books yet!!
Iain Banks ( both the sci-fi and the other stuff).
I mostly read biographies though which are more subject than author orientated.

Favourite authors would be Terry Pratchett, John Steinbeck and Joseph Heller.

For great authors I've never seen surrealist fiction as good as Noel Spillane's.

John Grisham
Dostoyevski
Lee Child
Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

And loads of others and you can quote me on that...

Bill Bryson
Christopher Buckley

A lot of my favourites are already mentioned, as well as few vastly overrated ones (take a bow messrs Dickens and Shakespeare! :D ).

Would also add Umberto Eco to the list. And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of my favourite ever reads.
Isaac Asimov is a class SF writer, and for just S, John Gribbin is a favourite of mine along with Dawkins.