The Greatest Author of Fiction of the Past 200 Years: Who?

There are some great important authors like Dostoevsky who can meet this criteria for me. I'm a student of classic fiction from the last 300-200 years so i have few authors i can claim fit this title but of course no single author can be the greatest. Dostoevsky is a master in his type of story,themes,fiction. He cant compete with Gogol for satire, GK Chesterton for wit, use of language or Poe with his ability for Poetry, imagination. Many authors have special talent for something specific and no one is really multi-talented in everything.

For me the greatest of the last 200 years cant be someone who is important in the way they write about the human experience but not among the best word for word writing,prose,imagination. Gogol, Dostoevsky, Goethe for example i would say are the most important European writers of the last 200 years but i would not compare them favorably to the one i nominate as the greatest in Edgar Allan Poe. He is the greater writer in prose, poetry,imagination, also importance. He is high on many criteria's. I prefer stylistic greatness to greatness in telling important human condition stories. After all writing is a craft, an aesthetic art.

Runner ups: Lord Dunsany(for prose style,imagination), Gogol(literary satire genius), GK Chesterton (best of british writer of the last 200 years). I think 1984 is one of the most important novels ever but not enough with single book to compete in this level.

Fun thread exo to compare important writer from the last 200 years :)
 
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Connavar said:
GK Chesterton for wit, use of language
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He's greatly undervalued and much more than "Father Brown", which loses a lot on the screen compared to books anyway (esp the USA version which is as close to Father Brown as "Murder She Wrote" to the real "Miss Marple" Books.)
But for pure wit and British Farce, P.G. Wodehouse surely is supreme (and again far more than "Jeeves and Wooster")? Nothing like as good as Chesterton for motivation and morality, or a good story.

Which all helps prove that even if we limited it to English originals (not all great authors have been translated?) or even Irish, or British or USA it's impossible.
USA: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)?
Ireland: Flan O'Brien, Yeats, James Stephens, Lady Gregory, Bram Stoker, C. S. Lewis, Bob Shaw, James White ... ?

How do you possibly pick between Polish, Russian, German, Czech, Chinese, Irish, British, USA, Spanish, French, Canadian etc?
 
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j d worthington said:
However, entering into the discussion with yet another name, I would strongly suggest Honoré de Balzac. Certainly, within the compass of his Comédie humaine, (let alone when including his other works), there is little or nothing which he overlooks as far as the range of human experience; nor does he lack for "imagination, emotional force, and intellectual perception" in covering any aspect of this. In fact, I would say he is at very least on a par with Dostoevsky; at times his superior.
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I haven't read any of Balzac's novels through yet, but it's interesting to see him named. My sense is that readers who know his work and Dostoevsky's would say that while there's breadth of social coverage in both, Dostoevsky goes deeper. When people talk about Dostoevsky, they often start mentioning Shakespeare or the Book of Job, etc. But I mean to try one of Balzac's novels one of these days.
 
j d worthington said:
What I object to with your opening question is the idea that anything like literature (or any other art) can be narrowed down to a single greatest.
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Perhaps, but I thought it would be interesting to take up the question and see how far we could go with it before we really did come to the point where we had to stop.

People who read a lot are often too ready to praise their favorites extravagantly -- which means such praise is worth little; it's pleasant chit-chat. So it seemed worthwhile to invite informal but reasonably serious discussion that would get us to think about what really would be requirements for assigning "greatness" to an author.

Now if I'd simply said "Who do you think are some of the greatest authors of the past 200 years?" -- responding to that would be easy enough -- we'd rattle off a bunch of names of authors who are probably great and who are favorites of ours. By now someone (perhaps I myself) would have mentioned Joseph Conrad, and Hemingway would've been mentioned, and Henry James, and a selection of current celebrated authors would probably have been mentioned. And that might have been mildly pleasant -- but precious little real thinking would have been done. But by inviting discussion on who is the greatest, we've seen, I think, a little more effort put into the conversation, which I hope is going to continue for some time....
 
Dostoievsky and Balzac cover each their specter of ‘the dark soul of the human species’/the internal horrors of the humans.
Doesn’t necessarily have to do with depth, as people can carry their frightfulnesses very superficial – only covered (if at all :whistle:) by a thin layer of … conventions ;)

As The Universe according to G.K. Chesterton says :
« Greatness is to be adored by antagonistic people for inconsistential reasons » :)
 
PS about Dostoevsky: I note too that his work has evoked searching commentary and unpacking of his ideas (e.g. on freedom) and related ones, from notable thinkers such as N. Berdyaev, George Steiner, and others. I suppose the greatest authors of fiction do this, move the searching minds deeply, get under their skin. Shakespeare does this too....
 
Extollager said:
PS about Dostoevsky: I note too that his work has evoked searching commentary and unpacking of his ideas (e.g. on freedom) and related ones, from notable thinkers such as N. Berdyaev, George Steiner, and others. I suppose the greatest authors of fiction do this, move the searching minds deeply, get under their skin. Shakespeare does this too....
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I think you'll find the same is certainly true of Balzac, who remains one of the most influential writers in the history of French letters, and whose works have powerfully affected a number of writers and thinkers worldwide.* Ditto, of course, Poe (simply look at the works listed in the notes for Prof. T. O. Mabbott's edition of Poe, for instance, or in the Bibliography of The Annotated Edgar Allan Poe).

*Incidentally, I think that you might want to look up Prof. George Saintsbury's edition of Balzac's works. They are, I believe, all available online, and well worth looking into.
 
Ray McCarthy said:
He's greatly undervalued and much more than "Father Brown", which loses a lot on the screen compared to books anyway (esp the USA version which is as close to Father Brown as "Murder She Wrote" to the real "Miss Marple" Books.)
But for pure wit and British Farce, P.G. Wodehouse surely is supreme (and again far more than "Jeeves and Wooster")? Nothing like as good as Chesterton for motivation and morality, or a good story.

Which all helps prove that even if we limited it to English originals (not all great authors have been translated?) or even Irish, or British or USA it's impossible.
USA: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)?
Ireland: Flan O'Brien, Yeats, James Stephens, Lady Gregory, Bram Stoker, C. S. Lewis, Bob Shaw, James White ... ?

How do you possibly pick between Polish, Russian, German, Czech, Chinese, Irish, British, USA, Spanish, French, Canadian etc?
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I havent read enough of P.G Wodehouse to judge his ability for pure wit,farce and i know he is the writer of comedy but i meant Chesterton for a writer not known for humor stories he has brilliant wit even in Father Brown stories. Really the literary talent he has its really waste of talent to limit him to mystery stories with a priest. I have read his other shorter fiction but not his novels, im sure he can make great story out of anything with his talent for words, language.

Frankly it would be easier if we limit the greatest in a single country and by the way be english language i mean all english speaking language like UK,USA,Ireland. Original English language authors and not translations since i read most of all the other languages in english since its the biggest translation language. I read German,French,Russian authors in Swedish since they are closer to north Europe in culture, language than UK/US/Ireland etc.

Ireland must be the greatest country in the world of literature if we go by the number of great authors per citizen. These top few names is enough to me:

Samuel Beckett, Lord Dunsany, Yeats, James Joyce, Jonathan Swift/Bernard Shaw. I had to cheat for a random top classic 5. Not to dismiss Dickens and other english contemporaries of those authors but the Irish literary history is the bigger brother of the two.
 
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It's so hard to compare someone like Dostoevsky to Dickens. How can a translation capture the beauty and rhythm of the language?
 
Yet, MWagner, once a book is translated and published, that translation exists. It is in fact now part of the literary heritage of the new language. If I were writing a history of English literature in the 20th century, I would want to include plenty on authors such as the great Russians, Borges, etc., who were widely read in translation and who may thus have been able to influence the thinking of many readers and the writing some authors. I don't want to ignore those books.

You look to see how translations are evaluated. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Dostoevsky in Pevear-and-Volokhonsky, Tolstoy in Maude, etc. These get good reviews and my reading life has been greatly enriched by such things.

I'm about to start a Thomas Mann thread and will ask for suggestions about translation(s).
 
MWagner said:
It's so hard to compare someone like Dostoevsky to Dickens. How can a translation capture the beauty and rhythm of the language?
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Because a bad translation cant capture the beauty of the original language but the best translations can often capture prose style, the voice of the original authors language. Otherwise we would never see the real quality of many authors like Gogol or Yukio Mishima etc
Frankly there are many legendary,modern greats outside English language that i have read and seen their real writing through the talents of translation.

Its not hard to compare at all i think popular classics like Austen, Dickens are fine in western Anglo lit world, European literary history but they are not comparable to the classic world greats like say Balzac,Gogol, Dostejevsky,Poe, Mahfouz, China Achebe. There is a reason for that comparison despite i dont speak french,russsian,arabic,nigerian etc

English is the best translation language thanks to how big,diverse its publishing world is and the many skilled language people translating,making me read authors from the whole world.
 
I second the vote for Poe. Also of note Calvino, Asimov and Tolkien (even id the latter prose is a bit dated).
 
Dracomilan, welcome to Chrons, and thank you for honoring this thread with your first posting.

I think Chrons policy is that one must post several times in response to others' threads before one can start a thread oneself; but maybe you would be interested in starting a thread here on Calvino? His is a name I've been seeing off and on for about 40 years but have never read. I have his Italian folktales book as issued many years ago by Pantheon, but have hardly touched it yet. (There's a thread on folktales elsewhere in this Literary Fiction subforum.)
 
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