well, obi, if everyone likes classical literature so much, it is kind of obvious that male authors are going to outnumber the female authors.

Well, naturally, kasimax, but still, there are a lot of great female authors still waiting in the wings...and even more if we open the doors to popular lit as well as classical lit...it's not as if George R.R. Martin has secured a place in the canon yet, after all. Agatha Christie? J.K. Rowling? Joyce Carol Oates, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou...I could say the Brontes, tohugh I have to admit I'm not huge fans of theirs myself (own a three-DVD BBC set for them, but it was only $14, so I figured $14 for 3 DVDs was a price I'd pay even for the Brontes...I say Emily's the best out of the three, at least her poetry isn't bad, and her prose has some style...Charlotte has all the problems of Jane Austen without any of the wit or flashes of literary style, and Anne is...well, she's Anne Bronte, which is like being Pete Best of the pre-fame Beatles, really--people know you exist, but any time they mention you, it's either A. to say "Oh, yeah, and that one, the OTHER one" or B. As a punchline...in much the same way I just used poor beleagued Pete Best.)

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.

Lady authors...the dudes outnumber them, but there's still plenty of classic and classy dudettes in the literary stable to choose from (and given the fact the audience for everything from YA and fantasy novels to romance and literary fiction has arguably skewered somewhat female in the last couple decades or so, we could see that gap really start to close if we get a lot of great female writers capitalizing on a market that's probably friendlier to female writers now than ay any point in history.)

"and given the fact the audience for everything from YA and fantasy novels to romance and literary fiction has arguably skewered somewhat female in the last couple decades or so, we could see that gap really start to close if we get a lot of great female writers capitalizing on a market that's probably friendlier to female writers now than ay any point in history."

that was actually exactly my point, obi ;)

^Well hooray then :p

And I actually saw "My Antonia" in Barnes and Noble this Saturday, semck...

Buuuuuuut I decided to go with Thackeray and "Vanity Fair" instead.

We shall soon see if that's a welcome change of pace from "Lolita" (or, as I like to call it, The Most Amazingly-Well-Written OH MY FUCKING GOD WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU YOU SICK FUCKING PERVERT PEDOPHILE SCUM OF THE EARTH MY GOD *STOP THAT!* Book Ever...not that I know of many others for that category, lol) or a 560 page mistake.

:)

I'll toss some votes in:
Jim Butcher
Brandon Sanderson
L. E. Modessitt Jr.
Karen Traviss

besides good old simone de beauvoir i have to say not the biggest fan of female authors, not being sexist at all, but between the fact men dominated the era, to the fact i don't like the brontes or austen, there is not many female authors i hold in high regard. and don't get me started on j.k. rowling. mary wollstonecraft is ok, good even, as are many others, but considering this list is missing camus, anatole france, dumas, swift, hardy etc. i can't think of one that really deserves to be on there (excluding those already on there)

@Obi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iO5-ic0Ug4

Victor Hugo
Edgar Alan Poe
Alexandre Dumas
Daniel Defoe

A lot of older authors, so I'll toss some more contemporary names into the mix:

Stephen King
Jonathan Safran Foer
William Kennedy
Neil Gaiman
Haruki Murakami
Bill Bryson
Cormac McCarthy
Jon Krakauer

Chesterton
Lewis
Pushkin
Homer

I thought we were restricted to four each...

Sorry, its an obiwan thread so I skipped all his posts out of habit. I'll cut my list down to four:

Neil Gaiman
Stephen King
Bill Bryson
Cormac McCarthy

Shakespeare
T.S. Eliot
Woolf
D.H. Lawrence
Goethe
Balzac
Ibsen
Kafka
J.M. Barrie
Maugham
Cather
Dostoyevsky
Austen
Tolkien
Iain Banks
Asimov
Terry Pratchett
Douglas Adams
Ken Follett
Carl Barks
Alastair Reynolds
Paolo Bacigalupi
China Mieville
Edward Rutherford
Samuel Beckett
Eugène Ionescu
Bret Easton Ellis
Douglas Adams
Kurt Vonnegut
George RR Martin
W.E.B. Griffin
Arthur Conan Doyle
Jim Butcher
Brandon Sanderson
L. E. Modessitt Jr.
Karen Traviss
Victor Hugo
Edgar Alan Poe
Alexandre Dumas
Daniel Defoe
Chesterton
CS. Lewis
Pushkin
Homer
Neil Gaiman
Stephen King
Bill Bryson
Cormac McCarthy

48 down, 16 more to go...so 4 more voters and we can get underway!

one last concern, obi: do you really need to make this a +1 whoring thing? i mean, you could make spinoff threads and everyone just posts his favourite author, right? what's the problem?

To keep it fair, the son off threads could be created by one of the participants each round (say, the underdog based on the previous round's voting).

Spin off...

And the actual inside post that gets +1'd is created by that nominees nominator.

Trudi Canavan, Peter F Hamilton, Dan Simmons, Alexander Solzhenitzyn (sp?)

Are we going to allow the people who nominated a writer to provide at least an excerpt of their writing for the interested readers, before voting begins?

Or is that perhaps pointless?

thoreau

and also emily dickinson

When did Thoreau write fiction, Thucy?

percy bysshe shelley and laozi to round out my list

is this only fictions? I mean what genre are you going to put poetry and a book like Walden in? I'd say they're hardly non-fiction OR fiction lol

Lots of good selections so far. How about:

Roger Zelazny
Tanith Lee (adding a woman to the mix)
William Morris (who was the pioneer of the modern fantasy novel)
Isaac Asimov

with a special mention to Lord Dunsany, who inspired a fair number of the writers above.

Here lies the body of this world,
Whose soul alas to hell is hurled.
This golden youth long since has past,
Its silver manhood went as fast -
An iron age drew on at last.
'Tis vain its character to tell,
The several fates which it befell;
What year it died, when 'twill arise,
We only know that here it lies.

...would you call that fiction? or what lol

I would say Walden is nonfiction, Thucy. It's a true account of something he did, and his thoughts while doing it.

I confess I wasn't aware he wrote poetry, though.

"...would you call that fiction? or what lol "

Certainly not. It's just poetry. But if TS Eliot is in, then poets seem OK.

well then all 4 of mine are poets, so leave em in haha

haha semck says it's "just" poetry :P