re: America's greatest literary critic about to release new book ranking authors

Faulkner, in my view, is by far the best on this list in terms of providing philosophical insights in his novels.

Addie Bundren's section in As I lay Dying is the finest chapter in all of American literature in this respect.

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That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had fear; pride, who never had the pride.

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I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other.

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we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swaying and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream.

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I know some wouldn't refer to him as a great writer. He would hesitate to even call himself a "great writer".

Louis L'Amour deserves a spot on this list. I have read and own all of the greats(we have 1700 books in our library right now). Louis was the greatest American storyteller.

I will admit, His books were not hard to read, he wrote for the everyman. Though I must also say his vocabulary and sentence structure was still 100x better than modern writers. His books were inherently serial in nature, and westerns were/are considered on the same level as comic books by most critics.

Thing is, while he wrote westerns, he did it differently than anyone else. His style worked for so many other genres too. Horror, mystery, fantasy,...etc. In fact, his best book was Historical Fiction, The Walking Drum. He could weave elements together in a way that no else could. In The Lonesome Gods, which in my opinion is his second best book, he knits together mystery, love, action, suspense, drama, even throws in a hint of horror.

The truth, wisdom, and knowledge he kneaded into his writing has taught me so much. All of his novels, and many of hos short stories, taught the reader something. If they were intelligent enough to grasp it. Because even he could use subtlety on occasion.

I think that is the goal of every writer. First, to tell a great story. Second, to elicit contemplation from the reader. Third, to teach the reader, about life, and to give them wisdom from the life lived by the author. So that they might learn and grow, or at least, contemplate and think on what was written. Critical thinking has been dying a long slow death in our culture. It has coincided with the growing unpopularity of reading.

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Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow

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The Walking Drum by Louis L'Amour

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I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.

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Sackett's Land by Louis L'Amour

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I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.

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Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L'Amour

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No one can "get" an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.

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Louis L'Amour

His poetry was excellent as well. Surprisingly.

An Ember in the Dark

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Faintly, along the shadowed shores of night
I saw a wilderness of stars that flamed
And fluttered as they climbed or sank, and shamed
The crouching dark with shyly twinkling light;
I saw them there, odd fragments quaintly bright,
And wondered at their presence there unclaimed,
That faded slow, like hope's arrested flight.

Or vanished suddenly, like futile fears- -
And some were old and worn like precious things
That youth preserves against encroaching years- -
Some disappeared like songs that no man sings,
But one remained- an ember in the dark-
I crouched alone, and blew upon the spark.

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They are 20th century modernist poets. Wallace Stevens, believe it or not, was a conservative business insurance salesman by day. He only wrote poetry on the side, and critics put him right up there with frost.

I do not particularly care for his poems though. I rarely understood any of them.

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He was in house counsel for an insurance company in Hartford. But by the time he got going, they basically paid to have a great poet staff.
Stevens' poems are very hard to understand, but once you do they are deep, and the language is beautiful.