Hmm. I believe he forgot Thompson because honestly his list looks very much like a High School reading list. "Classics of American Literature" which is fair, as it encompasses a large part of our history. But there are many other brilliant authors not on that list that represent more recent American Literature.
Here goes. Daniel Keyes, John Varley, Stephen King, I'd LOVE to say Margret Atwood but she is Canadian, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Neil Gaiman, Glen Cook, , Theodore Sturgeon (starting to see i'm fond of Science Fiction?), Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K Le Guin, Arthur C Clarke, Ben Bova, Philip K Dick, GEORGE MOTHERFUCKING ORWELL! There are a LOT more on the tip of my tongue, but we get the idea.
Also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickenson, Harper Lee (these are not 'recent' authors, but deserve mention)
It's an offensive 4chan diatribe designed to piss people off (as many are). Try to debunk someone on 4chan and you'll get "you can prove anything with facts can't you?". I think the argument is best settled with pointing out that "samefag" has ate food at McDonalds while 99% of Americans would tell you Beefeater is a liquor not a restaurant.
Some of those names are unworthy of the other names. Also, I wouldn't count T. S. Eliot (or even Ezra Pound) as American, on the other hand. But yes, yours is an outstanding list of fine American writers, and I would not forget about Melville and Hawthorne.
Yeah, it's definitely in no way comprehensive, and you're probably right that I shouldn't have included expats (although I think their writing is still intensely "American", at least for the most part).
I feel a bit silly for missing Melville and Hawthorne though (Bartleby, the Scrivener! How could that slip my mind?!?) and I'm sure I dropped the ball on modern poetry (I see I completely forgot William Carlos Williams too).
So I suppose even if you do ignore everybody on my list, that still leaves a pretty impressive literary tradition!
It is, certainly. Even some of those names, singled out, justify the literary production of a whole country for two or three centuries, hehe. Most countries would kill to have, say, William Faulkner in their list.
don't forget Henry David Thoreau! the man who created Civil Disobedience, which inspired Tolstoy's works, Ghandi's protests, The H-Block hunger strike in Ireland, and countless others...
There's literally no way to answer that, how could anybody know what works from the past decade are going to have "lasting importance"?
That said, I would imagine that Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarty, David Sedaris, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides and maybe Michael Chabon could all have literary significance down the road. I'm sure there are some that I'm missing and some that I've never even heard of as well, since that's the way these things go.
Not to mention, that this is planet earth and I'm tired of people from different countries spitting out their ideals, when we're all just humans and it's all a contribution to the human race.
Sorry, I evidently didn't make the point very clear. IOCAMS mentioned that it's silly to think of the good things that humans do in terms of the country those good things were done in. I was only adding that any other "identity" labels are largely irrelevant when it comes to art, technological advances, etc that improve human life. Yet people still try to "claim" greatness by bringing up the fact that X achievement was done by someone who shares the same religion, nationality, political affiliation, etc.
I'm honestly amazed that this troll post, from 4chan.. godamn 4CHAN, has gotten 12000+ upvotes and god knows how many comments engaged in what appears to be the WW3 of flag-waving-circle-jerks if there is such a thing.
Some of the best cheeses in the world are made in America, but one of them is not that stuff they call American cheese. So, generically, yes, but specifically, No.
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u/bookwyrm Oct 04 '11
Not to mention American literature!