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2014-02-27 03:33 4612344 Anonymous (sorry lenny.jpg 600x764 453kB)
In honor of John Steinbeck's 112th birthday today, lets have a discussion on American literature. Who is the best American author? To me, Steinbeck is the epitome of America. The flowery prose of Faulkner is better left to those across the pond(s), and is not in the American spirit; Hemingway rarely wrote about America; Twain's great, but his prose seems too plain, dialogue aside

7 min later 4612355 Anonymous
Poe

12 min later 4612361 Anonymous
tao lin

20 min later 4612373 Anonymous
>>4612344 the best laid threads...

21 min later 4612377 Anonymous
tao lin

22 min later 4612379 Anonymous
>>4612373 >>4612361 >>4612377 goddamn, no rabbits for me

35 min later 4612388 Anonymous
Burroughs. He mixes the specifically American ideal of libertarianism with an old world socialist mindset.

35 min later 4612389 Anonymous
tao lin

38 min later 4612392 Anonymous
>>4612344 walt whitman is really the only answer

40 min later 4612393 Anonymous
>>4612344 >The flowery prose of Faulkner is better left to those across the pond(s) funny how the best american writers have always been European spirits: Poe, James, Eliot, Faulkner

55 min later 4612406 Anonymous
>>4612344 Heminway, with Tao Lin in close second

57 min later 4612409 Anonymous
>>4612388 > ideal of libertarianism with an old world socialist mindset What that mean

1 hours later 4612423 Anonymous
Steinbeck was a fifth-rate socialist philosopher that, aside from maybe The Moon is Down, never wrote anything good in his entire life. He was a hack that put the socialist agenda ahead of aesthetic merit and all of his 'great' works noticeably suffer from it.

1 hours later 4612491 Anonymous
>>4612423 Explain.

1 hours later 4612496 Anonymous
>>4612423 HAHAHAHA the moon is down is probably his worst short novel. also faulkner is GOAT nice b8 OP

2 hours later 4612515 Anonymous
>>4612496 >HAHAHAHA the moon is down is probably his worst short novel. Nothing is worse than The Pearl. And I don't mean merely within the confines of Steinbeck's oeuvre.

2 hours later 4612521 Anonymous
i dont read communist writers

2 hours later 4612522 Anonymous
>>4612515 That's actually the only one I haven't read yet. Is it really that bad?

2 hours later 4612527 Anonymous
>>4612522 Don't listen to him. I fucking loved The Pearl.

2 hours later 4612539 Anonymous
>>4612521 That's because you're illiterate.

2 hours later 4612544 Anonymous
>>4612539 the only letters i need to read are U, S, and A

2 hours later 4612546 Anonymous
mark twain, i think. kurt vonnegut holds a special place in my heart

2 hours later 4612547 Anonymous
i read mice and men and it was nice and then it got sad, but over all i liked it a lot

2 hours later 4612549 Anonymous
>>4612521 Why not?

2 hours later 4612558 Anonymous
>>4612549 i take the wisdom of my founding fathers seriously and have read their constitution and nowehere does it mention DICTATORSHIP like communism. WE THE PEOPLE must fight for our freedom and never surrender to the ideals of tyrants. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRtl Ui3OJ_c

2 hours later 4612562 Anonymous
>>4612558 Umm, yeah, I think /pol/ has some posters that need de-communistization, if you really want to help America, go teach them.

2 hours later 4612571 Anonymous (american eagle greatest country.jpg 1024x768 302kB)
>>4612558

2 hours later 4612591 Anonymous
>>4612379 tao lin wrote that

2 hours later 4612648 Anonymous
>>4612393 Ezra Pound as well.

2 hours later 4612654 Anonymous (Based Pynchon.jpg 2200x3037 1350kB)


2 hours later 4612659 Anonymous
>>4612344 >Hemingway rarely wrote about America About 50% of this "complete short stories" are about America, m8.

2 hours later 4612660 Anonymous
East of Eden (his 'masterpiece') sucked absolute dick. only thing of his i read and somewhat like was Of Mice and Men and that's b/c i was 14 and it was a decent story. Fuck john steinbeck though he's top 5 overrated writers all time Oh yeah and Faulkner's work absolutely rapes Steinbeck's, OP is confirmed for pleb for trying to compare the two

2 hours later 4612667 Anonymous
>>4612660 Not as overrated as Updike

3 hours later 4612714 Anonymous
>>4612654 If that guy had used braces and had a proper haircut I'd read his work.

3 hours later 4612728 Anonymous
>>4612660 >can't even write in his own language This is what happens when you put some well-written, deeply emotional and socially aware novel as required reading in school. Edgy illiterate faggots that surrender to the cryptic obscureness of the likes of Faulkner can't appreciate a simpler story in which the narrative is a means to an end not entirely artistic. They leave school with the scars of "OMG this book sucks, why is To Kill a Mockingbird such a shit". Hope you grow up one day.

3 hours later 4612762 Anonymous
Walt Whitman, hands down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG8t qEUTlvs

3 hours later 4612775 Anonymous
>>4612667 updike is, if anything, underrated now. everybody loves to hate him.

3 hours later 4612784 Anonymous
>>4612728 >doesn't recognize the value of both writers you're just proving him right you fool!

3 hours later 4612834 Anonymous
>>4612558 How are you going to fight for your freedom effectively if you don't even know how your enemy operates?

3 hours later 4612836 Anonymous
>>4612491 He provides no interesting language techniques, only messages behind the storylines he creates which, compared to philosophical novels, are basic uninsightful left-wing tosh

3 hours later 4612842 Anonymous
I'm not american never even been there but I absolutely adore Steinbeck. Grapes of Wrath is one of my favourite books. I'm reading East of Eden now.

3 hours later 4612853 Anonymous
>>4612659 half of his short stories...none of his novels, none of the other half of his short stories...

3 hours later 4612886 Anonymous
>>4612762 So Walt Whitman's the most American cuz he was in a commercial?

4 hours later 4612898 Anonymous
>>4612886 Yup. That's right.

4 hours later 4612905 Anonymous
>>4612784 >>doesn't recognize the value of both writers Excuse me, where did you get that idea from my post? >>4612853 >>none of his novels >he hasn't read The Torrents of Spring I wouldn't consider that as 'rarely'.

4 hours later 4612975 Anonymous
>>4612905 >none of his novels >he hasn't read The Torrents of Spring that's a novella, my annoyingly technical m8 compared to the scope and praise of his works based abroad, reading something based in America by him seems to be, maybe not numerically, a rarity

4 hours later 4613038 Anonymous (melville-ani.gif 524x686 1225kB)


4 hours later 4613059 Anonymous
>>4613038 the late Hiram Melville

5 hours later 4613342 Anonymous
>>4612546 >Twain >Vonnegut Those two do go together. Vonnegut named his son Mark Twain, after all. Plus there's the hair.

6 hours later 4613501 Anonymous
>>4613038 One hit wonder

6 hours later 4613519 Anonymous
it's tao lin

6 hours later 4613522 Anonymous
How do you refer to Faulkner's prose as "flowery" and manage to live with yourself?

6 hours later 4613525 Anonymous
based Cormac McCarthy

6 hours later 4613578 Anonymous
>>4612344 >Hemingway >Poe >Emerson >Hawthorne >Thoreau >Melville And William James for nonfiction. He is so fucking based, I literally come whenever I read him for too long. His work on religious experience is so fucking, fucking based. It's insightful as fuck, smart as balls, written with God's own shaft. It's fucking based. Hemingway's first book, In Our Time, is legendary.

6 hours later 4613581 Anonymous
>>4613525 double

6 hours later 4613585 Anonymous
>>4613501 Fuck no, Moby-Dick was a failure in its time. Typee, his first, was a huge success and was the reason why he was famous. That was his one-hit wonder. Moby Dick became famous in the 1920's only, 70 years after its publication.

6 hours later 4613590 Anonymous
>>4613578 William James is also heavily referenced by plenty of American writers. It's a pity he is not more prevalent. His brother was a decent storyteller too.

6 hours later 4613607 Anonymous
>>4613590 I'm surprise nobody mentioned Henry.

7 hours later 4613684 Anonymous
>>4613607 Me too. It's not like his work isn't being taught in academic settings either. My guess would be that his particular brand of realism is not really /lit/'s thing.

7 hours later 4613707 Anonymous
>>4613585 Not to mention Bartleby the Scrivener and Billy Budd.

7 hours later 4613723 Anonymous (imagesFAT_CITY[1].jpg 225x225 9kB)
this book right here

7 hours later 4613823 Anonymous
>>4613522 "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears" flowery =/= bad...but, come on

8 hours later 4614114 Anonymous (happy.jpg 250x296 22kB)
lovecraft... lovecraft? anyone?

9 hours later 4614297 Anonymous
>>4614114 yes. this. virtually created science fiction horror all by himself. While everyone else was still playing with Christian themes he took horror out of the middle ages and into the 20th century.

9 hours later 4614349 Anonymous
>>4614114 >>4614297 Other Americans have done much more

9 hours later 4614383 Anonymous
>>4614349 >Other Americans have done much more you know, when people say that it's usually followed by "such as..., who created..."

9 hours later 4614401 Anonymous
>>4614114 I like Lovecraft

9 hours later 4614403 Anonymous
I started reading "Maggie, a Girl of the Streets" today and it's really good

10 hours later 4614409 Anonymous
>>4614114 Lovecraft's prose is awkward and most of his stuff is just rehashing the same concepts.

10 hours later 4614412 Anonymous
Don DeLillo

10 hours later 4614423 Anonymous
>>4614383 such as every other author mentioned in the thread

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