Thoreau and the transcendentalists rival anything the Germans ever did, obi

^

To obiwan in particular I recommend a re-reading of their works. Didn't you say it's been since high school?

thucy, you clearly didn't read "the Germans" in the original german.

ONLY THE ARABIC QURAN IS THE HOLY QURAN

Bullshit! Everyone knows the original Klingon is the *only* was to read the KQU-rahhn.

I'm going to vote Chesterton.

And as for Obi's rant on American Lit... he definitely has a point. In the "literature" genre America generally sucks. That's part of the reason I vehemently disagree with the assessment that genre fiction is necessarily sub-par. I will say though, that Moby Dick may be an acquired taste, but it's still awesome. And Melville's other short stories are really good as well.

6-2 Chesterton, I believe.

I think Reynolds had 3, but yes, 6-3 Chesterton wins.

And I don't think America sucks (anymore) in literature, Warden...we had some great authors in the 20th century.

But that plus Twain gives you just around 150 years.

Add to that Poe, Melville, Whitman, Thoreau (OK, happy, Thucy?) and maybe a couple others...and that's really *IT* in terms of good-to-great literature.

So America's like that young expansion team that's getting better and better, and Britain's the old war horse that's been in the league forever, has a ton of championships and scoffs at the silly expansion team.

...And Canada and Australia are teams that are...um...help me out here...

Someone not named mapleleaf complete this sentence. :p

And we continue our Round of 64 with...

A Sci Fi writer vs. a Noted Literary Name.

GEE, WE HAVEN'T SEEN *THAT* HERE BEFORE!

(If nothing else, this tournament's exposing our literary tastes, lol...and then we have a Sci Fi vs. Lit mini-war going on...with some interesting results--I wouldn't have guessed we'd pick Jane Austen over...well, anyone, never pictured her as a person that'd be popular here, and on the flip side of that, Pratchett/Gaiman was a war, and Douglas Adams almost unseated arguably the most influential single "man" in Western Literature.)

So, today--

Fighting out of the Sci Fi corner, it's...another person I've never heard of--

Paolo Bacigalupi (someone of Italian descent makes it into this tournament...but NOT Dante or Carlo Collodi and his Pinocchio...but a Sci Fi writer. Of course.) :p

And, our literary figure for the day--

Daniel Defoe, of "Robinson Crusoe" fame.

I've actually heard of Defoe...never read "Crusoe" (the novel's concept's never interested me) but it influenced others I DO like (such as Jonathan Swift, and his "Gulliver's Travels" is sort of an answer to Crusoe...and makes me wish Johnny was here instead, as Swift's hands-down the best satirist for centuries in English Lit and is arguably still top dog there--"A Modest Proposal" on my part, to be sure :p )...

And according to Wikipedia (which is ALWAYS accurate!) Defoe was a spy?

...Was he really? Following in Marlowe's footsteps there?

Anyway, influencing later authors + being a spy is enough for me:

Defoe: 1
Bacigalupi: 0

Defoe.

Bacigalupi

The wind-up girl, and the story about the dog... wow.

deffo defoe (what an awesome joke!)

defoe: 3
bacigalupi: 1

"a modest proposal"was great. For some reason I think it is very vaguely similar in theme to "a mouth is for eating" - another hard look at our sensibilities.

Defoe.

Defoe. Although Bacigalupi's credentials look impressive, I've never read him.

How about "Canada is emerging, quietly shipping out good books."

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, Surfacing
William Gibson - Neuromancer, All Tomorrow's Parties. He invented cyberpunk.
Emily Carr - poet, around the turn of the 1900's
Leonard Cohen - poet, novelist. A ton of his songs are poems too.
Yann Martel - Life of Pi
Mordecai Richler - The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Solomon Gursky Was Here
L.M. Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables
Spider Robinson - Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
Stuart McLean - storyteller (radio)
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Fionavar Tapestry
A. E. van Vogt - Children of Tomorrow, Empire of the Atom
Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
Leslie McFarlane (a/k/a Franklin W. Dixon) - The Hardy Boys
John McCrae - In Flanders' Fields. One of the better known poems commonly recited, here anyways.

Lots more of course; this is just the sampler plate.

You seem to have left Alice Munro, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, off your list of Canadian authors. Also, I'm not so sure about listing Emily Carr as poet. She's famous for her paintings and her prose (especially autobiographies), but I don't think many people think of her as a poet.

Well, OF COURSE Canada would be doing it quietly, Theodosius...

They're too polite to make a big international ruckus like their naughty noisy neighbors downstairs! ;)

@obi :)

@Fishstudios. I took some of her poetry in school. A few authors discussed here are better known for their work outside of fiction, like William Morris, which isn't to say their fiction is the worse for it.

Crusoe

Defoe: 6
Bacigalupi: 1

tegucigalpa or whatever his name is, just for the hell of it.

Thanks for pointing out Alice Munro, FS. A Nobel prize isn't bad, all things considered.

So Defoe goes SECRET AGEEEEENT MANNNNN! and beats Bacigalupi 6-2.

Who doesn't want to see some 17th century spies dance to Johnny Rivers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iaR3WO71j4

Today........

Well, fancy this, Fantasy Writer vs. Noted Literary! It's deja vu all over again!

In this corner, the rather punk-rock-looking China Mieville, writer of "New Weird" fantasy, advocate for Leftist UK politics...and according to Wikipedia, "formerly a member of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) until resigning in 2013 over the allegations of rape against 'Comrade Delta'."

Any UK WebDippers know what that was all about?

And in the other corner, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas.

Now, I have a problem with Dumas--he is partially responsible for what is quite possibly one of the worst adaptations of "Hamlet" out there--

The French opera, wherein everybody's favorite Melancholy Dane sings about wine and winds up living at the end and taking the kingship to cheers of "Long live Hamlet!"

This deviates just a tad from Shakespeare's story.

I've only ever seen one other person get a Shakespeare play just as wrong, if not more so--a girl I tutored once who had, as her thesis, that Romeo and Juliet live at the end, Romeo laughs off his mistake, and they all live happily ever after.

Once again, that's just a wee bit different than what Shakespeare had in mind...but at least this girl was a college student (a "Creative Writing major," which I maintain is neither creative nor does it lead to good writing...good writing has come from a wealth of different places, but sitting in a nice neat little collegiate circle and stroking one another off over how cool your short story was...yeah, not so much) and NOT a world-famous novelist. Oh, Dumas, how could you?

Oh well, I still know and like you more than random fantasy writers, so--

Dumas: 1
Mieville: 0

Mieville, for sure, though I did enjoy the Three Musketeers.

Mieville, because, like you said, that Hamlet adaptation...

Dumas.

I would also like to suggest that any votes that refer to "Melville" be disqualified. (Not that any have; I merely foresee a possible problem).

dumas