/lit/ - Literature

Who was America's foremost prose stylist?

>>8985531
Honestly before I decided to take an elective creating writing class in my second year of college I was just your average 5'8 nerdy guy with just about enough self-awareness to feign a sense of mystery to the (very) few females who occasionally looked my way. I was a passive nobody, a nihilist who saw so little value in life that I hadn't even bothered to grasp the definition of nihilism and just used the word to justify waking at 3pm and lying in bed posting on 4chan and eating dark chocolate biscuits. I dressed in the same clothes my mother had bought me before I entered my senior year at Bishop Kelly High School in Boise, Indiana. Here I was on a campus surrounded by young people whose will to succeed in life (if only in the sexual sphere) totally overwhelmed my own wan, tame approach to life. When I finally submitted my interest in taking a creative writing class I was the kind of sad, sorry kid you see standing with his arms crossed with the hunched posture of an animal who feels he exists to be nothing but potential prey to those around him. Well imagine my surprise when I turned up late to my first writing class after staying up to post about the Zimmerman / Martin court case until 6am, dressed in black and grey and dark brown with the usual sullen, impassionate expression on my pale face. Within minutes of sitting down I realized that this is where I truly belonged. My G-d! This was home! This was what I'd been searching for! Every class I turned in a new story, and in every class I could sense the anticipation in my peers' eyes as someone came to the conclusion of their own story only to give way to my own new piece of writing. The faculty was stunned! Never before had they come across someone like me (a semitic-seeming lady who appeared to have no salaried role at the college but appeared apparently from nowhere to make rye remarks about those who attended it) often referred to me aloud (in the presence of my peers, the shame!) as "that boy genius" and "our blooming author". By the end of the course (a mere semester!) I had become a 6'2 beast roaming the intellectual plains. I wore heavy plaid and baggy jeans and hesitated and winced before replying to some question a cute undergrad holding her textbooks across her chest and looking up at me with wide eyes and pressed lips as her girlfriends talked and poked each other nearby. I was envied and respected in equal part, and with each new grant, each new scholarship offered to me, I was fast approaching that moment when a highly intelligent boy becomes a man of the world, an established member of the intellectual elite. The world was mine at last! It yielded to my will at the gentlest of touches! Professors nearing retirement, seeing me striding towards them along the narrow staff corridors, frequently patted their pockets and stepped back into their offices muttering something in an attempt to make me think they weren't just retreating from an inevitable intellectual defeat.

Who is America's greatest living author?

Hello anon, Gassposter here. Time is running out to read the 20th century's foremost prose stylist. Begin with Omensetter's Luck. Resume with The Tunnel.

>Writing by hand, mouthing by mouth: in each case you get a very strong physical sense of the emergence of language—squeezed out like a well-formed stool—what satisfaction! what bliss! That’s another reason why I like the metaphor, in Willie Masters, of cunt and concept. As an artist you are dealing with a very abstract thing when you are dealing with language (and if you don’t realize that, you miss everything), yet suddenly it is there in your mouth with great particularity—drawl, lisp, spit. When the word passes out into the world, that particularity is ignored; print obliterates it; type has no drawl.

Is he right? Do we lose something in not writing by hand? If you read what you type out loud you surely sidestep the issue completely.