Who's Your Favorite Author?

When the weather turns warm my thoughts turn toward literature and writing. Maybe it's the juice flowing again in the trees but no matter how much or how little creative writing I'm doing throughout the year come spring I get the itch to do more and this year has been no different. However, now that I'm writing here full-time I have less time to work on other projects and as the thermometer climbs I'm torn between my cyber writing and my short stories.

So as I'm thinking of literature and writers I'd like to emulate I ask: Who is your favorite author?

I favor late 19th-early 20th century Americans Willa Cather and Edith Wharton: O Pioneers! My Antonia, Song of the Lark, Death Comes for the Archbishop, A Lost Lady, Lucy Gayheart, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, Ethan Fromme, The Buccaneers, I'll consume anything these women wrote. But my favorite writer is Wallace Stegner.

A writer from the American (and Canadian) west, he taught at several universities but ended at Stanford where he founded the creative writing program there and developed a course in writing fiction that became legendary. My father recommended I read Angle of Repose, for which Stegner won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize, and throughout the entire 600-something pages I was hooked.

My opinion of modern late-20th century prose is similar to that of my spam box: jumbled characters full of innuendo and blather best deleted rather than viewed. Have you read Ulysees? I swear I've seen sentences like that in my spam folder. Amid the junk mail and screenplays passing themselves off as literature today, Stegner's works stand out as sentences with meaning. Each word contributes to the work as a whole and each character is as individual and fascinating as the next.

If I've tempted you enough to pick up one of his books I'd recommend starting with Crossing to Safety. It's rather short and follows the intertwining lives of two married couples. Or perhaps The Spectator Bird, which follows a man who has recently lost his parents and his only son--in short his family history and future--and travels to Denmark, his mother's birthplace, to discover his roots. It's a bit of a mystery but more a Danish Roots than a plot-driven novel. If you like those tackle the autobiographical Big Rock Candy Mountain or Angle of Repose, his masterpiece. Each of his works center on the universality of common people experiencing life's circumstances but tie in themes of humanity, morality, love, frailty and tragedy.

Stegner died around 1984. What I would give to have been able to take his creative writing course but I'm left instead to wish I had a prayer of writing as he did.

So who is your favorite? Which author have you read the most? Do you have some novelists you like, ones guaranteed to provide a fun read? (Despite my diatribe against modern fiction I've read all of Dan Brown's and John Grisham's novels) or do you fly across the spectrum, sampling here and there? Whose talent do you envy? I'm curious . . .

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