Who are everyone's favorite authors?

[chopiabin]

I guess mine would have to be

Nietzsche
Toni Morrison
Flannery o'Connor
Bertrand Russell
Ken Kesey
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Tom Stoppard
Arthur Miller
William Faulkner
James Joyce
Jean Paul Sartre
Stephen Hawking
Alexander Scriabin
Arthur Rimbaud

And about a billion more I can't think of now. Any biographies of musicians, books on music, etc.

Chop

[chopiabin]

Oh, yeah - David Sedaris, Michael Moore

[eddie92099]

Charles Rosen (and not just for Piano Notes ),
Ed

[Noah]

Boris Vian, Milan Kundera, Douglas Adams

[Eek Lek Tik]

I'll second Douglas Adams.

[thracozaag]

Off the top of my head....

Erich Maria Remarque
Charles Bukowksi
John O'Brien
Maynard Solomon
Philip K. Dick
Graham Greene
Kundera
Octavio Paz
Lorca
Borges
George Orwell
Richard Price
H.P. Lovecraf

[Beethoven87]

John Steinbeck

[Plaz]

Herman Wouk
Michael Chabon
Neal Stephenson
Victor Hugo
Ayn Rand
Isaac Asimov
J.R.R. Tolkein
Douglas Adams
Scott Adams

[Beet9]

My favorite authors are:

Jane Austen
C. S Lewis
Anya Seton
J. K. Rowling (Go Harry Potter)
Charles Dickens

[thracozaag]

My favorite authors are:

Jane Austen
C. S Lewis
Anya Seton
J. K. Rowling (Go Harry Potter)
Charles Dickens

 Anglophiles unite

[Hmoll]

- Iain Banks
- Robert Stone
- Carl Hiassen
- Lawrence Block
- Raymond Chandler
- Barbara Tuchman
- Gunther Grass

Off the top of my head.

[schnabels_grandson]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anton Checkhov
Stendhal
Leo Tolstoy
M. Scott Peck
Paul Verlaine
Fyodor Tyutchev

[Hannah Joy]

I admit to being an Anglophile:)
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
J. R. R. Tolkien
Charlotte Bronte
Elizabeth Gaskell (Wives and Daughters)
C. S. Lewis
There's more, but those are at the top.

[Clare]

I'm a Jane Austen fan too!

Also,
Ishmael Reed
Any Bronte sister
Truman Capote
Patrick Suskind
Patrick Hamilton
E E Cummings
Kurt Vonnegut
Hunter S Thompson
Amy Tan
Evelyn Waugh
W Somerset Maugham

Mmm... can't think of any more right now.

[chopiabin]

oh, yeah. I forgot about Emily Bronte.

[eddie92099]

I'm a Jane Austen fan too!

My friend lives in Jane Austen's old house, and Jane's father taught at my school. Now there's an irrelevant fact!
Ed

[Clare]

Woah! That rocks!
I'd love to be able to walk down the street and think to myself, "Mmm - yes, this house here is over five hundred years old, and Someone Incredibly Famous lived here..." etc.
That's Europe for you.

[Contessa]

Karl Marx
Plato
Gustave Flaubert
De Laclos
Murger
Pratchett (though not in french!)
A.A.Milne
D. H. Lawrence
Shaw
Disraeli
Emily Dickinson (though I only know her poetry, so does that really make her an "author"?)
Honoré de Balzac

...and a million more, I suppose...but then, we all say that  

[bitus]

Dostoievski
Stendhall
Shakespeare
Clavell
Romanian: Preda, Eliade, Eminescu, Sadoveanu, etc
The Mystics: Toma d'Aquino, Francisc d'Asissi, etc.

... plus all those other million that mademoiselle Contessa mentioned
The Bitus

[Colette]

nabokov
faulkner
huxley
james joyce
dylan thomas
orwell
eugene o'neal
wallace stevens
bradbury
robert lowell
william carlos williams
auden
james dickey
randall jarrel
eecummings

sure that i'm forgetting some, but i'm very picky about my favorites...

[dolcejen]

CS Lewis
Tolkien
Leo Tolstoy
Dostayevsky
Jeff Shaara
John Piper
Vanaukin

I really like Russian authors (Tolstoy, Dostayevsky) and am looking for more  - Any suggestions?

[brahmsian]

In no particular order...

Jean Paul Sartre
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Albert Camus
Immanuel Kant
Ayn Rand (only her fiction- her philosophy is garbage)
Arthur Schopenhauer
Glenn Gould (some of his liner notes are hilarious)

I'm kind of into philosophy...

[Floristan]

Novelists, in no particular order:

George Eliot
Thomas Mann
William Faulkner
Jane Austen
Henry James
Charles Dickens
Joseph Conrad
Thomas Hardy
D. H. Lawrence
Virginia Woolf
E. M. Forster
Mark Twain
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Colette
Ian McEwan
Shirley Hazzard
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Leo Tolstoy
Nikolai Gogol

[gilad]

i never read at school, only once i finished did i start reading for leasure. I havnt build up a list of authors at all,

but  i love

roald dahl, what a legend. His autobiography my favourite read ever.

[thalbergmad]

Enid Blighton

[brahmsian]

I really like Russian authors (Tolstoy, Dostayevsky) and am looking for more - Any suggestions?

Read" Fathers and Son" by Ivan Turgenev

[chopiabin]

Vonnegut
Marquez
Blake
Arnold
P.B. Shelley
Frost
Wilde
Woolf
Hesse

[pabst]

the ones worthy of mention

went thru complete novels and plays of Jean Genet, didn't regret one minute
did a lot of amateur translations of Blake's poems to portuguese
found the Tristan und Isolde libretto on a flea market, one of the best reads I have ever done - alongside Eschenbach's original Parsifal
currenlty redoing Foucault masterworks on the original french, I dropped this some years ago and apparently I haven't gotten any better, la merde 
when I feel like really stretching my brain I pull out some L'être et le néant or some Ezra Pound.
books rocks.

[frichmondj]

I think I'll have to say...................Moses.  Of course we know he cheated.  He was told what to say........................

[rob47]

these days it's China Mieville

[Mozartian]

In no particular order:

Jane Austen
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
William Shakespeare
Dante Alighieri
J. R. R. Tolkien
Charles Dickens
Evelyn Waugh
Agatha Christie
Miguel Cervantes
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Flannery O'Connor

(yep- anglophile and proud of it )

[bachelssohn]

Wally Lamb! She's Come Undone is incredible.

[chozart]

Arbitrarily (at least preference wise) listed:

Pablo Neruda
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Ana Maria Matute
Frederico Garcia Lorca
George Gordon Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
William Blake
Alfred Tennyson
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mark Twain
Emily Dickinson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Edgar Allan Poe
Carson McCullers
E.E. Cummings
Carl Sandburg
Walt Whitman
Kurt Vonnegut

I've probably left out someone else I love, but this looks, now, like a good representative list ~

[rc]

CS Lewis
Tolkien
Leo Tolstoy
Dostayevsky
Jeff Shaara
John Piper
Vanaukin

I really like Russian authors (Tolstoy, Dostayevsky) and am looking for more  - Any suggestions?

I'm a fan of the Russian authors too. Tolstoy's style is so understated and the plots are so thick and believable, W&P is my favorite novel so far. Then there's Dostoevky, not so believable, but I haven't read anything more intense that his works, they really get into your head!

Recently I've been into a collection of Chekhov short stories, his style is unique. The stories are extremely varied, and he just sort of puts forward these scenarios without any intention of solving them, just questions without answers that get the gears grinding. Very interesting stuff.

I'll have to check out the Turgenev suggestion, thanks.

[brokenagraffe]

Mark Leyner and Isaac Adamson.

[Waldszenen]

• Victor Hugo
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Alexandre Dumas (pere)
• Shakespeare
• Lord Byron (kind of boring sometimes though)
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• J.K. Rowling
• Dan Brown

I'd also put down Dante Alighieri but it's sort of unfair cause I've only ever read the Divine Comedy and nothing else.

[shasta]

Ray Bradbury
Richard Feynman
Carl Sagan

[Bouter Boogie]

J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown if it comes to authors who write in English

- BB

[dolcejen]

Recently I've been into a collection of Chekhov short stories, his style is unique. The stories are extremely varied, and he just sort of puts forward these scenarios without any intention of solving them, just questions without answers that get the gears grinding. Very interesting stuff.

Thanks for the suggestion...I went to the library today and got some Chekhov. I love War and Peace, too. I've read it once, probably 5 or 6 years ago,  and am planning on reading it again soon.

[oscarkimball18]

     Tupper Saussy. 

[randmc]

1. Dan Brown
2. C.D. Payne
3. Fyodor Dostevsky
4. J.K. Rowling (if she would do anything else but Harry Potter)
5. Maya Angelou
6. Frank Perelli

[bronwyn87]

yes...J.K. Rowling all the way

[pianistimo]

pearl s buck
shakespeare
milton
mitchner
louis lamour
various trendy authors that take an item and ramdomly associate ideas (although i don't like history to be written as though it took place in the 20th century)
history books
nature lover books - like audubon
stories of early american indians
diaries of lewis and clark
stories of survival - 'on ice' (good one)
artistic books - and children's books with great illustrations (happen to love beatrice potter and also 'the tale of despereaux' by ? can't remember tonight)  the illustrations are cool.
mark twain
various humorists
winston churchill
bible
musicians autobiographies (claudio arrau, mozart letters, rachmaninov, chopin letters, reading more about samuel barber).

ps sometimes scores of music read like a book

[xenon]

Dr. Frank Vertosick
Brian Jacques
Dr. Ben Carson
Dr. J Kenyon Rainer
Dante Alighieri
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Albert Camus
Campbell & Reece
Moore, Stanitski, & Jurs