Voros
Doomed Investigator
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2017
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If you simply follow well known that will do it, and takes personal taste out of it. I love Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe but if you want to name drop, lets see just on school reading list favorites not from the south you have Hemmingway, Steinbeck, London, Vonnegut, Salinger, Asimov, Bradbury, Herbert, Chandler, Thoreau, Irving.
Many is not at issue, most is hard to support for any region.
See that's why something like this is subjective though.
I'd consider all of the writers you mention a step down from the ones I already mentioned in terms of aesthetic achievement. Some not even in the same neighbourhood. And I like and read all of them. Not saying they suck but compared to McCarthy and O'Connor? No contest to me.
And to add to the subjectivity several of those writers literary reputations have been (sometimes unfairly) on the slide for decades and are only considered 'major' writers within the US or their genre community.
So I was talking about the greatness of the literary tradition which is not just the 'best known.' Greatness is not so easily quantifiable.
There are more well known English novelists than Irish novelists but that doesn't make the English tradition greater, the opposite in fact.
To paraphrase Carlos Fuentes 'Every few years the Irish come along and give the novel a kick in the ass.'
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