The 10 best writers in the USA

Determining the best of the best of the narrative of each country contains large doses of subjective interpretation, tastes, affiliations and other literary preferences between a diversity of genres and styles. But subjectivity fits perfectly into our always relative world, where not everything is black and white. This is how it should be and this is how I dare with a selection that will please or scare you, depending on each one.

Also venture out with best writers made in USA, with the extensive and varied nature of this country, is more complex because it is necessary to make discards or painful and surprising omissions. Even so, we are going to get on with it with the sole and best desire to open debate. Or also in order to offer clues so that everyone can later indulge in unexpected readings.

Top 10 best writers in the United States.

Stephen King. The monster of literature.

The boundless imaginary of Stephen King it appears to us as a beam of light unfolded towards all dimensions from its particular prism. There are no limits in the bibliography of Stephen King and trying to circumscribe it to the horror genre is short-sighted.

Because there Stephen King much more from terror to reach the fantastic, science fiction, historical fiction, dystopia, ucronías or apocalypses. All this with characters that emanate a realism like few authors are capable of presenting.

From the anecdotal to the essential or from the most fantastic budget to the closest sensation. King inhabits places where no one can access, lush forests of the imagination exuding a coldness that permeates the bones or open spaces that expose us to all kinds of bad weather. Existence made raging humanity of detail. Imagination as a substratum of our subjective vision of the world. Stephen King it is Prometheus made writer.

One of his best books...

Mark Twain. Narrative exuberance.

Samuel Langshorne Clemens decided one fine day to pursue journalism. His pseudonym would be Mark Twain, and taking advantage of the platform that some media gave him, he articulated (pun intended) his thinking contrary to everything that the mistreatment of peers entailed. In a country like the United States, which at the end of the XNUMXth century was still weighed down by powerful pro-slavery lobbies, it did not win much sympathy (I bring here an interesting reference to abolitionism in the United States, the underground railway).

So Mark Twain parked journalism and focused on literature, where he would end up being one of the references for all the new writers in his country. His extensive, all-encompassing work served as the cradle for future generations of new authors (as he also recognized William Faulkner occasionally).

But while his good work and charisma gave him growing glory and fame in the United States, his legacy crossed borders and spread throughout the world. Because Mark Twain had the virtue, scarce in our days, to reconcile youth and adult novels in the same work. Got so Tom Sawyer's adventures on the one hand and those of Huckleberry Finn on the other will reach universality in the field of letters. It is not surprising that a mind capable of such a synthesis produced a profuse narrative ensemble that embarked on a diversity of genres.

Unfortunately, Mark Twain's last years turned into deep sadness. It is not natural to survive a child, imagine how tragic it must be that it happens in three of the four offspring. Widowed and with that natural repetitive and disheartening sadness, Twain faded between the last and emotional recognitions of an entire country. Here I bring you a volume with the best stories of him:

Issac Asimov. accessible sophistication.

And we come to the greatest of the science fiction narrative: Isaac Asimov. Having spoken before about authors classics like Huxley o bradbury, great exponents of dystopian science fiction, we reach the genius who cultivated everything in this scifi genre, elevated to the altars at times and reviled by literary purists at other times.

Here is one of the latest reissues of his essential foundation trilogy. A fascinating edition beautifully illustrated…

Asimov was already pointing out ways due to his own academic training, in which he achieved a doctorate in biochemistry. Scientific foundations on which to ponder were not lacking in the Russian genius from Brooklyn.

Before turning twenty, Asimov had already published some of his stories between the fantastic and the scientific in magazines (a taste for the story that he spread throughout his life and that they have given for a multitude of compilations)

His very extensive work (also diverse because he made his forays into detective, historical and of course, informative works), has given much, being the cinema a great recipient of his proposals. Many of the best cifi movies we've seen on the big screen bear his stamp.

Truman Capote. glories and shadows of the soul.

Truman Capote is a writer with generational stamp, I would almost say stigmatized, like any stamp or label that is endorsed without possible revision. It happens that our natural tendency to group, associate, characterize and label as if everything were a product ends up limiting all kinds of creative or artistic expression. Raw but real.

There should be no generations of noséqué or tendencies of noséquánto. But hey ... I'm off topic Truman Capote strictly concerning his work (perhaps it was his subversive nature that led me to this last ramble).

The point is that good old Truman was that sought-after emblem, yes. His novels, authentic social chronicles (both on the glitter of opulence and on the most decadent and rugged on the other side of society), magnetized a critic that raised him to the altars or tore him to pieces. Between one and the other they ended up forging the myth even more. Here below his mythical Breakfast at Tiffany's...

Ernest Hemingway. the pen made brush.

Live to write it. That could be a maxim of this great writer of the XNUMXth century. Ernest Hemingway He was a restless spirit who liked to live life in long drinks, in all its edges and possibilities. From Hemingway's handwriting, the most transcendental fictions of so many world events of that turbulent century were forged XX that passed between wars, revolutions, great inventions, cold wars and a first sign of globalization and knowledge of the cosmos in a space race that is still in progress today.

It is not that Hemingway is a universal chronicler of everything that happened in his twentieth century, but what is undoubted is that the reflection of his characters immersed in all kinds of situations make him a successful narrator in a fictional key of that passing of the human being for this world.

Joyce Carol Oates. quintessential suspense.

A literature teacher always hides a potential writer. If the subject of the letters is very vocational, every lover of these ends up trying to replicate their favorite authors, those whose works they try to instill in the students. In the case of Joyce carol oates, It is not only possible to point out her performance as a teacher of Language and Literature. It should also be noted that she also has a degree, a doctorate and a Master in the subject of language and its most artistic re-creation (Literature).

So aesthetically, structurally and functionally we find that Joyce writes with full knowledge of the facts. But of course, if she doesn't like the background, she could never have reached where she has, being a recognized writer all over the world. Here below I present the famous novel by Oates on which she based the movie about Marilyn for Netflix…

Charles Bukowski. realism more than dirty.

Bukowski is the irreverent writer par excellence, the author of visceral books that spread bile throughout all areas of society (sorry if it was too "visual"). Beyond approaching this genius with internet searches such as «Charles Bukowski phrases»With which to recover his visions of life, the final reading of his works is raw life inoculated into a vein.

Because Charles Bukowski He was a temperamental writer who one fine day decided to write what he wanted and which ended up curdling in a multitude of readers who ended up worshiping him for his nihilistic rebellion, for his fatalistic touch and for his way of revisiting the tragic life under the prism of a humor caustic.

Literature needs figures like that of this author committed to nothingness, to denial, to rebellion just for the sake of it, to disenchantment. And despite all this, Bukowski's characters offer brilliant glimpses of humanity when from time to time they confess that they also feel, raising those feelings to the highest, like someone who spits at the sky and undauntedly waits for the only possible answer coming from a calm sky and subjected to inertia... Down here the one that for me is the an initiatory work for anyone who wants to get closer to Bukowski and his reasons for writing as well as his arguments for doing it in such a bestial way.

Patricia Highsmith. ingenuity in abundance.

The police genre will always have as a singular reference to Patricia Highsmith. This American author created one of the most picturesque, sinister and likeable characters in the entire production of the genre: Tom Ripley. And yet it was not in his mother country where the character in question was best received.

In a way, the author raised many of her works more in tune with a more European idiosyncrasy, more prone to mockery and satire introduced in all genres, including the police, however pure it may be. And Europe ended up welcoming it with open arms.

Although that success also had to do with the release of certain American labels that to a certain extent condemned a paradoxically misony but lesbian author, prone to drinking, capable even of addressing homosexual issues in her books, even though it was initially under a pseudonym ..., and this in America in the mid-twentieth century it was not entirely accepted.

Despite focusing a large part of his work on Tom Ripley, there is nothing to disdain many of his other books in which the particular Tom is not the character. In fact, his first novels without him seem much more complete, without that serial point that every chain of novels with a single protagonist usually acquires. Below is one of his most unique works...

David Foster Wallace. uprooting as a focus.

There may be some myth. As with the 27 club in music. The thing is that reading David Foster Wallace has something of a tragicomedy taken to delirium, to excess, even to madness. Intensity from disenchantment that leads to parody brimming with sarcasm. Satires of the one who sees himself apart and can testify with his literature the strangeness of the world.

Despite being an emblematic figure in the United States, the arrival of the work of David Foster Wallace to Spain was produced as a kind of posthumous recognition of the myth. Because David suffered from a depression that haunted him from his youth until his last days, when suicide ended everything at the age of 46. An inappropriate age for the end in which the echoes and contradictions of the gifted and creative mind, but at the same time leaning into the abyss of destruction, are paradoxically transformed into a greater interest in the work.

In 2009 the David Foster Wallace books They began their journey through parts of the world that they had not previously reached, consuming themselves mainly until then in an American market in which their proposal had indeed emerged as an interesting composition of very deep characters plunged into the whirlpool of modernity.

Diverse topics from sports to television media or the usual critical review of the American dream. His arrival in Spain was carried out first in approaches to his facet as a storyteller and then with the full weight of his most relevant works. Wallace, despite his more chemically regrettable circumstances, was not a writer dominated by some kind of pessimism characteristic of his illness or his medication.

Not at least in the typical moral of the disaster that can emerge from authors such as Bukowski o Emil cioran, to name two illustrious pessimists. Rather, we find in his books quite the opposite, of an intention to build vivid and even histrionic characters in sometimes delusional approaches that arouse humor and confusion indistinctly.

Utopias and dystopias that assault a transformed reality, characters that doubt the construction of the world that surrounds them or that let their existence rock on it. A critical intention about reality itself in an exquisite form that spreads ingenuity, like an automatic writing revised and scripted later in search of a meaning that as soon as it discovers the sarcasm of our human condition as it projects us into that space where fiction is filled of symbols that break the world into parts.

David Foster Wallace is the narrator of a world devoured by the dreamlike. And it is already known that in dreams we go from humor to fear or from desire to disgust from one scenario to the next.

Edgar Allan Poe. the explosion of the fantastic.

Brief but intense, irregular in its publications but with a complex depth between the fantastic and the delusional. With certain writers you never know where reality ends and legend begins. Edgar Allan Poe is the quintessential cursed writer. Cursed not in the current snobbish sense of the term but rather in a deep meaning of his soul ruled by hells through alcohol and insanity.

But ... what would literature be without its influence? Hells are a fascinating creative space to which Poe and many other writers frequently descended for inspiration, leaving shreds of skin and pieces of their soul with each new foray.

And the results are there ... poems, stories, stories. Chilling sensations between delusions and feelings of a violent, aggressive world, lurking for every sensitive heart. The darkness with the adornment of the dreamlike and the insane, the lyricism of out-of-tune violins and voices from beyond the grave that awaken obsessive echoes. Death disguised as verse or prose, dancing its carnival in the imagination of the intrepid reader.

A good compilation of the best of Poe, the master of terror, we can find it in this great case for lovers of this genius: