Great Prose Stylists, Old and New

Celebrated Prose Stylists (Old-Canonical Writers): Herodotus, Thucidides, Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch,* Tacitus, Cicero,* St. Augustine,* Clement of Alexandria, Nicholas of Cusa, Bonaventure, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Pascal,* Montaigne, Descartes, Leibniz,* Pierre Bayle,* Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding*, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon,  Sir Walter Scott,* Edmund Burke*, Thomas de Quincey,* Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte,* Anne Bronte, * Elizabeth Gaskell, Honore de Balzac, Stendhal, Nathaniel Hawthorne*, Herman Melville,* Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, John Henry Newman*, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Ivan Turgenev, Guy de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov*, Saki, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James,* Joseph Conrad,* Bram Stoker,  Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton,* Marcel Proust,* Franz Kafka,* Robert Musil,*  James Joyce,  F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), H.L. Mencken, Katherine Mansfield, Vladimir Nabokov, Walter Lippmann, * (* denotes special commendation/personal favorites)

Impressive Prose Stylists (Contemporary Writers): Andrei Platonov, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller (for Catch 22 exclusively) John Updike, Shirley Jackson, Alice Munro, Fumiko Hayashi, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, Bessie Head, Alifa Rifaat, Naguib Mahfouz, Ian McEwan, Heinrich Boll, Karel Capek, Alberto Moravia, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Anita Desai, R.K. Narayan, Muzaffer Izgu, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Halberstam, Robert Caro, William Manchester, Barbara Tuchman, A.S. Byatt,  Julian Barnes,

Not-So-Impressive Writers, Overrated As Prose Stylists  (in my humble opinion): D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather,  Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, Albert Camus, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy....

The conversation starts now...Feel free to agree, disagree....add names to the list!