Wicked Modern Authors.

What happened to them/where are they, and/or, who do you consider amongst them? I spend most of my reading in a mishmash of pre-Renaissance, somewhen Enlightenment, a dab of Renaissance, and then whatever that era was called in the 19th century, with most of it being philosophy, but what happened post-19th century? Where are the compelling authors of the 20th century that I'm overlooking?

I have this large gap, between medieval era literature/writing and 19th century literature to the 20th and 21st century. Antiquity's pretty easy to pin down, considering quite a bit of the more renowned works in Western society are by Greeks that everyone's heard of.

20th century, though? Um. What and who am I overlooking? Doesn't necessarily have to be philosophy, although that would be preferred. (Philosophy is to me like romance fiction is to young school girls.)

To clarify, by wicked, I mean extremely cunning/clever in argumentative ability. At least in regards to my interest in 20th century philosophical authors.|||Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, Bram Stoker, George Orwell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gerard Reve, Harry Mulisch and Willem Hermans.||| I need to keep better chronological order of my authors. Apparently I'm familiar with more than I would have thought. Twain, Hemingway, Orwell, Doyle, and Lee I recognize. Except I never cared for Harper Lee's work.

Thanks for the quick list. Did you know those off the top of your head?|||Quote:








I need to keep better chronological order of my authors. Apparently I'm familiar with more than I would have thought. Twain, Hemingway, Orwell, Doyle, and Lee I recognize. Except I never cared for Harper Lee's work.

Thanks for the quick list. Did you know those off the top of your head?




How can anyone not like TKaM?! That book is iconic.|||Southern dialect, personally. Intriguingly, I could tolerate books like As I Lay Dying and Their Eyes Were Watching God.|||Sinclair Lewis|||Jean Baudrillard

Jacques Lacan

Claude Levi-Stross

Jacques Derrida

Roland Barthes

Umberto Eco

Michelle Foucault

Frantz Fanon

Homi K. Bhabba

Terry Eagleton

Slavoje Žižek

Mikhail Epstein

Wolfgang Welsch

People I used to care about and more people to add, I lost my traction there few years ago. I have more focus in Japanese and African literature past 4 years.|||Quote:








I need to keep better chronological order of my authors. Apparently I'm familiar with more than I would have thought. Twain, Hemingway, Orwell, Doyle, and Lee I recognize. Except I never cared for Harper Lee's work.

Thanks for the quick list. Did you know those off the top of your head?




Yeah. Though iirc, most Doyle, Twain and Stoker's publishings were 19th century, they all continued to write into the 20th. The last three are famous Dutch post war writers, very typical for 20th century writers.

The ones I recognize from Atlantis' list are solid as well.

James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, JD Salinger and Samuel Beckett. Though personally, I dislike absurdist literature.



EDIT: Oh oh, Roald Dahl.


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How can anyone not like TKaM?! That book is iconic.




Pretty simple: imagine having to read it with school - at the speed that an average high school class actually reads. Apparently I read about four times faster and I even read faster out loud than most high schoolers read internally.

Hard to enjoy a novel when you're being berated for enjoying it.|||I briefed out few names from theory, philosophy and psychology that had effect on me.

May as well add Stanley Fish, Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Dollimore.

This list could include belletristic too?|||I suspect that the problem is this:

"Really old books" covers thousands of years, so naturally there are a huge number of such books that were good enough to last through the generations. 20th/21st century books are recent enough that you know all the ones that were any good at all (or at least enough not to notice a lack). But the period you're looking for isn't big enough to be chock full of epic literature, and not recent enough for you to know the non-epic literature.

People have already listed a bunch of the relevant authors, so I won't bother to add any other then Faulkner.