This week, I want to read the best of the Americans. Like the literary equivalent of Cindy Crawford in an American flag bikini in 1990 (pic related). Any time period or any genre or any format (novels, poems, short stories, essays, fiction, non-fiction, etc.), I don’t care. I just want to read the best American work. What are your favorites? Show me your literary Cindy Crawford in an America flag bikini in 1990, please.

Read Faulkner. After that, you’re done.

>>24509348 (OP)
Read the genres America invented; the Western and the hardboiled detective.

For westerns I’d recommend The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout and The Oxbow Incident by Walter Tilburg Clark.

For hardboiled detective I’d start with The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Then move on the Ross Macdonald and Chester Himes.

>>24509348 (OP)
Imo its Hemingway, but I've yet to read Faulkner. I doubt I'll find him as good as Hemingway, his stories seem to be more about the prose than the plot. I would place Hemingway and Poe in the S tier. Then I would say the second bests are guys like Melvile, McCarthy or Lovecraft, and I would place guys such as Bukowski in a third category, but he's really good if you're a wagecuck or have lived a tough life in general Inb4 getting hated on for putting Lovecraft in the same category as McCarthy and Melville

>>24509431
I‘ve been trying to come up with a top 5 American authors and typically end up putting Lovecraft in the 5 spot on the reluctant justification that weird fiction conveys a meaningful theme of Faustian drive gone horribly wrong in the American experience. That‘s all post-hoc though and the real reason is that I can‘t find a fifth American writer who I really like (as an American.)

The top 4 are Pound, Faulkner, McCarthy, and O‘Neill.

>>24509348 (OP)
I never found her particularly attractive

>>24509468
I can see how someone would place Pound among the tops if they like poetry, most of it bores me so I'm very ignoranton that subject. Have never heard about O'Neill. I'm not American either. I would say Fitzgerald is a quintessential American author but not as great as the others I've mentioned earlier

>>24509348 (OP)
catcher in the rye is The brother karamazov of American literature.

>>24509383
Then you wake up after the liquor has run it's course, and need something for the hangover.
>pic related

>>24509473
To each his own. It was less about the individual and more about the spirit, anyway.

>>24509596
>Sirs, I'm going to draw a mustache on her in photoshop and no one is going to stop me

The Courtship of Miles Standish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

>>24509348 (OP)
Phillip Roth unironically -- American greatness in the post-war culture, enchantment with generic goyisch beauty
Obviously this led to disaster but you are not asking with this picture for the greatest American writers

>>24509468
What an idiotic list

Melville
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hemingway
Ezra Pound
TS Eliot
Walt Whitman
Hart Crane
Faulkner (though unfortunately he's unreadable for normal people and not a perfected stylist like Joyce)

>>24509383
He sucks

>>24509348 (OP)
>>24509596
I really don't understand how dudes can be gay, bros...

Anyway, other than Emerson, does anyone have any recommendations for the best American essayist?

>>24510865
Poe, Thoreau, DF Wallace.
Not an essay, but go read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River. It's great.

>>24511407
What essays of Poe would you recommend? I didn’t even really know he was an essayist, only knew him for the poems.

>>24511684
The Philosophy of Composition, The Rationale of Verse, The Poetic Principle, his reviews of Defoe, Dickens, Coleridge, Hawthorne, Irving, Longfellow, Lowell, Simms, and... himself (lol).