Who are your favorite writers who were clearly talented enough to be canonical "literary" writers but chose to become great genre writers instead?
>>25158494pic unrelated?
HammettChandlerJohn MacDonald
>>25158494He wanted to write about the American southwest colonial history, but couldn't find publishers for that kind of work.
>>25158499Reread the Conan stories and pay closer attention to the prose.
>>25158506>>25158494OP you are laughable at least post a genre writer with good prose like edward john moreton drax plunkett.
>>25158510Is Mervyn Peake a genre writer? I found his prose amazing. Like watching a painting being made one brush stroke at a time.
>>25158513Good pick.
>>25158503Did he end up writing any of that? It sounds interesting
>>25158494Ligotti for sure, weird fiction very much blurs the line between genre fiction and litfic
>>25158519I quite like his Breckinridge Elkin stories in "A Gent from Bear Creek". They're two-fisted Western stories but in an intentionally comedic, somewhat elevated Americana way - the protagonist dressing head to tail in furs he hunted himself, and a brawl where people demolish a room and every piece of furniture is described as a squabble. After the teutonic weight of his sword and sorcery stuff it's fun to see Howard pull off being funny as well.
Tolkien?
>>25158519No because he ate his pistol at 30 when his mom died. Heart-wrenching stuff. He could have gone so much further.
>>25158597Tolkien has some of the worst prose ever. Don’t bait.
>>25158494
>>25158605No because his westerns aren't western genre, they're something else entirely. They are that way and not some other way.
>>25158616This is a litfic cope. They're westerns, through and through.
Rex Stout?
>>25158597Probably, yeah. Anyone with an aesthetic sense that refined is capable of great art in any number of registers.
>>25158494A fair bit of Howard's Conan stories are pulp slop he pushed out just to get a paycheck, but the good ones are truly great, and deserving of the literary title. Tower of the Elephant is a standout. Such a shame he killed himself at 30. >>25158597Tolkien is popular enough and academic enough that I think he automatically counts as literary. His non-LOTR, medieval and myth stuff is certainly considered as such.
>>25158643No, they're much deeper than that.
>>25158650>A fair bit of Howard's Conan stories are pulp slop he pushed out just to get a paycheckThey were still enjoyable, especially the one that starts off with Conan getting crucified. Also, Conan stories were the most requested by Weird Tales' female readership. Turns out that deep down every woman wants to be slapped on the ass and called a slut.
>>25158494Dukaj
>>25158510Dunsany and Howard are pretty much in the canon now thoughbeit. Like Lovecraft (despite his racism, and questionable prose).Talent will eventually survive critics, political or not. Our kids, your wife's kids anyway, will be talking about all three of these people in a hundred years like we're still talking about Poe.
>>25158698>despite
>>25158605Ive only read BM, what's his other good stuff? I have a mind to read the road this year
>>25158698What's wrong with Lovecraft? Ive only read one short story
>>25158779I just finished his Border trilogy, it's not as violent as Blood Meridian and it's slower paced, but somehow even more dark and depressing.
>>25158781people complain he overwrites, they are philistines
>>25158793I think Lovecraft's prose is excellent. I really get annoyed when people accuse him of not describing monsters enough, I think he does, he gives you the perfect amount of glimpses of the creatures in his works to construct them in your head, it's why so many of his creations have so many different artistic renderings that are both unique and accurate to the text
only tolkien
>>25158800People have the same complaint about Alan Moore. He'd write things like>Clouds like plugs of bloodied cotton dabbed ineffectually at the slashed wrists of the sky.Which apparently some people think is overwritten, but I love.
>>25158803If more moderns wrote like this, I would read them. But the soul has been drained out of them by their obsession with reaching "the masses".
Mr Wolfe
>>25158808Don't worry, soon AI will be churning out all the bland, inoffensive, unoriginal slop you could ever hope for.
>>25158803I don't think that imagery makes any sense
>>25158816context helps
>>25158643Agreed. The style postures as profound and obscure but something about especially the scenes feels very genre.>>25158698>Our kids, your wife's kids anyway, will be talking about all three of these people in a hundred yearsI feel like they either might not even be talking about much better authors or they will be talking more about some of the worse ones. Chambers is so much more popular right now then Bierce. Poe likewise isn't an overall great artist, he had many creative but more importantly iconic ideas.>>25158800>I really get annoyed when people accuse him of not describing monsters enough, I think he doesThe problem for me is how he could have restrained it to those glimpses, but insists too much and loftily how indescribable and ancient the horrors are. Also emulating archaic styles for grandiosity tends to come off as cheap but it's not too big a problem in Lovecraft. I think he's better than Poe.>>25158537>weird fiction very much blurs the line between genre fiction and litficTrue. My contender would be Aickman. Not really considered a genre writer in the first place but not acknowledged or mentioned enough alongside the "literary" names.>>25158803Sometimes I'm awed by Alan Moore's structural ability and he always has an interesting story to tell but his prose can feel like he wants to sound literary and his dialogue can be terrible and on the nose.
>>25158494Writing serialized fiction was simply a more reliable way to get paid for your writing.
>>25158643They're westerns as in they capture a real way of living that existed in the American west. Atph is the closest to a traditional western and even in that McCarthy is reprimanding the reader for their trad expectations.
>>25158893it was dirty how they did my boy John Grady, he didn't deserve that ;_;
>>25158815Be that as it may, I will only ever read those authors who write with soul.
>>25158800His prose is good when he's describing a New England town or something like that. It's when he's describing the fantastical mythos elements that it gets a little rough.
>>25158800>I think Lovecraft's prose is excellentbait
>>25158506Most of the Conan stories are among Howard's shallowest work. You don't really get a sense of his artistic depth until you start looking into his horror, his historical fiction, and everything regarding his Pictish mythos. It's also worth doing a little research on any of this stories that particularly interested you, because odds are there's some ancient forum post about it that includes a relevant passage from some letter he wrote that can better help you understand what he was going for.
>>25158718the young ones have aged into a fine cemetary of cemented shit-brainfind it in yourself to laugh graciously at their attempt
>>25158988Dude had such a big headTotally takes me out of the immersion of his attempted hypnosis
>>25158779Child of God has great prose.
>>25158494Chandler, Dunsany, Chesterton and especially Leiber, although I think the framing as though "literary" is better as opposed to midwits obsessing over the preference of a specific clique of 19th century Frenchmen is fundamentally ludicrous. The fantastic tale is the main mode of human literatre throughout history and "character-focused psychological naturalism" is a niche, uninteresting slopgenre.
>>25158513One might say Mervyn is peak.
>>25158993>A wolf-fanged ghost who rode the midnight lightning.You will never compose a sentence that metal.
>>25158513I just finished Titus Groan and I'm so starting Gormenghast.>>25158815Fritz Leiber warned us in the 1960s but of course we thought he was exaggerating :(
>>25161209this anon aint wrong cuz
>>25161018This is my favorite thing about Oscar Wilde. He tried so hard to be super aesthetic and all this shit but he actually had a body like Boris Karloff. Just this huge ungainly Irish golemoid. It's funny as shit to imagine him struggling with it, like those 6'7" trannies you see sometimes trying to be feminine and petite. Comedy gold.
>>25158513He looks like Epstein
>>25161217He's a riot>sorry to have to do this everyone, but please meet my fat little mexican sister
>>25158494Doesn't exist. If a writer was talented enough to be canonical they wouldn't become a genre writer.
>>25161239>being talented>using that talent only for what you want them to use that talent for>not realizing canonical writers all share a certain something that they have purposely fostered as a choice
>>25161205>The fantastic tale is the main mode of human literatre throughout history and "character-focused psychological naturalism" is a niche, uninteresting slopgenre.It's not the subject or the "naturalism" but the sophistication and originality that elevates (or should, at least) it to a level where it's has no label but a classic, and people call it "literary". Genre fiction, and even myths depending on how they're conveyed are artistically conventional in what they do with the form, and the simplicity of reality they create.
>>25161239Proven false by canonical writers who write genre works.
>>25161212I loved Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Titus Alone is interesting... it makes me wonder if it was what pre-dementia Peake wanted or if it really is the result of his early onset dementia. Also, Steerpike is amazing. One of the greatest villains put onto the page.
>>25158510How red-blooded are they?I don't want no pussy shit.
>>25158519Read "The Black Stranger," replace "Picts" with "Indians" and "Zingara" with "Spain"
>>25158605I wish Robert E Howard had written Blood Meridian instead of this pseud.
>>25161541Behead those who insult McCarthy.
>>25161494There are maybe one or two anons on this entire board who will even understand this post and not get buttmad thinking it's bait.
>>25161424Did you read the two short stories, "Boy in Darkness" and "Titus Awakes"?
It will never stop being amusing to me how people try to be contrarians so hard that they claim different genres of literature are bad.Genre is just genre. Non-fiction is also a genre.
>>25158494Patrick O'Brian and John Le Carré.>https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/books/011700mamet-writing.html
>>25162421genres are just a social construct
>>25162433>socialYou mean literary, which is correct. It is a way to differentiate between the types of literature.
>>25162451literature is just a social construct
>>25162456You are such a dumb nigger.
>>25162480Nigger is just a social construct
>>25161494Yup, and I don’t even like sea fiction.
>>25162406Not yet, no.
Harlan Ellison
>>25161322>it's the sophistication and originality that elevates my sub-Freudian blabbering about the inner lives of uninteresting bourgeoises and their miserable servants above the level of genre, just like the five hundred other identical novels about uninteresting bourgeoises and their miserable servants>there's nothing artistically conventional about this novel which clings to my clique's artistic conventions like glue, you see
>>25162188Nah look at thisMcCarthy:>They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm. >They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruin of old walls, such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing.Howard (AI):>They rode through a broken land where the very bones of the earth had been torn and twisted by the wrath of forgotten ages. Towering cliffs of many-colored stone thrust upward like jagged fangs, split by deep gashes and shelves of dark rock that rose in twisted folds, curved back upon themselves, and ended abruptly like the shattered stumps of colossal stone trees. Great cracks where lightning had blasted the rock yawned open, and from hidden springs steam burst upward in ghostly plumes, as though the ground still boiled with the memory of some ancient, terrible storm.>They rode past long walls of brown stone that ran like the ruins of ancient fortifications down the steep, narrow ridges and spilled out onto the barren plain beyond. Everywhere were signs of the hand of man—yet not of any man who had ever walked the earth, nor of any living thing that had drawn breath beneath the sun. These were the works of titans long vanished, or of forces older than life itself, carved and broken in the first dawn of the world when the gods themselves made war in the void. The riders felt the crushing weight of that primeval desolation upon their souls, and the iron-shod hoofs of their horses rang hollow upon the stone as though they rode across the floor of a tomb older than time.
>>25158494Gotta love how the entire discourse is literati pseuds struggling against all shade that they threw on genre lit just to end up as the only ones still aware of it. It's like watching Mormons discussing non-sinful ways to have sex.
>>25166076kek, based.
PKD
>>25163571>sub-Freudian blabbering about the inner lives of uninteresting bourgeoises and their miserable servantsif its just that, it is practically genre fiction. but there is undeniably a crowd that reduces a book with great detail and play with language and structure into the "bourgeois" and the "servants" it is about, while being impressed with the same hero's journey plot with no subtlety and a cast of types and page turner tricks.
>>25158494Why did this fatty not just stop eating so much and lift weights? Its funny how he produced all these books as a cope. I would never read his shlock, self insert barbarian bullshit contained in midwit prose.
>>25165328What is this supposed to mean? Howard's AI copycat is a better writer than McCarthy? Is that really your source for your claim? God, you're a troglodyte.
>>25158513Prosefags are insufferable. Prose exists to assist a plot and Peake couldn't write a plot for shit. Furthermore, a plot exists to depict truth in a symbolic fashion, and Peake wouldn't have been able to do that either.
Bester
Borges
Robert Silverberg.
>>25165328>Howard (AI):get off my fucking website you filthy Indian
