Vonnegut's place in your personal heirarchy

Re: Vonnegut's standing

My starting nine (no real order)

Joyce Carol Oates
Hawthorne (only the short stories)
Nabakov
Fitzgerald
Flannery O'Connor
Kafka
Steinbeck
Dreiser
Crichton (the guilty pleasure)

 

H.P. Lovecraft belongs on the roster.

 

West's crying again. He thought this was dead Americans only.

 

Good pick with Flannery O'Connor.

I thought we were doing Americans, though, Alma.

 

As far as Vonnegut...Hunter S. Thompson is an apt comparison. Thompson did his finest work 35 years ago, so did Vonnegut. Neither were romantics, either, despite trying to write that way. They were too angry, too unable to see past their own ego in later years. When the genuine rage wore off and became more intellectual rage, their work suffered. I don't see much reason in reading Vonnegut's work from the last 20 years, although I've read some of it. Other writers were saying a lot more urgent things a lot more urgently.

 

Following Alma's lead, my starting nine (again, in no particular order):

Hemingway
Poe
Twain
Fitzgerald
Bradbury
McCarthy
London
Vonnegut
King (my guilty pleasure)

 

Ah. Didn't know.

Nabakov is not American. No American ever been that good of a writer.

For him and Kafka, I'd substitute Carver and Tobias Wolff.

 

So Alma dissing Twain. Interesting picks, though.

Any love for Joseph Heller?

 

Nelson Algren never gets enough love, IMO.

 

James Joyce says to tell you that he's very angry indeed that you chose Nabokov, and to look for him tonight in a livid vision of death's dark wrath at the foot of your bed. Joyce, that is. Perhaps with Tolstoy. Or Dickens. Leo's got a thing tonight at Chekhov's and may not make it. But one way or another, livid vision, foot of the bed. Tonight. Doestoevsky's still a maybe.

 

Twain's not my favorite.