O Pioneers! (& Lists of Authors)

So I couldn't help myself. I had to go to the Boulder Bookstore. I'll try to go in Monday to see if maybe they are hiring. But the trip tonight was purely for pleasure. I mentioned in a recent post my obsession with myth and romance. I had odd demands of what literature I wanted to read next. I didn't want a long novel, because I don't think I'd have time to finish it. I was hoping for short stories, maybe about America and Americans. I thought about a Steinbeck novel, one of his short works. But in the end I got O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, used for $6. It's the Norton Critical edition, too, in very good shape!

There's something about the way Cather writes about Nebraska that really resonates with me. It's rugged living, real life face to face with the harshness of nature, but through strong character and force of will, man finds a way to carve out a beautiful, meaningful existence. It's the kind of strength that I wish I had in my life.

Chris and I were talking about how we liked British Literature so much more than American Literature when we were in high school. I've come to really appreciate American literature, particularly later writers, but I still love British and World literature.

Americans:
John Steinbeck
William Faulkner
Mark Twain
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Kurt Vonnegut
J.D. Salinger
Willa Cather
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Edgar Allan Poe
James Fenimore Cooper
Harper Lee
Sinclair Lewis
Ray Bradbury
Henry James
John Updike
Tennessee Williams
Saul Bellow
Flannery O'Connor

Brits:
William Shakespeare
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
E.M. Forster
Aldous Huxley
Rudyard Kipling
William Golding
George Orwell
C.S. Lewis
J.R.R. Tolkien
Mary Shelley
Bram Stoker
Arthur Conan Doyle
William Thackeray
T.H. White
Joseph Conrad
Lewis Carrol
Christopher Marlowe
W. Somerset Maugham
Graham Greene
D.H. Lawrence
Thomas Hardy

Irish:
James Joyce
Bram Stoker

French:
Marcel Proust
Albert Camus
Victor Hugo
Gustave Flaubert
Antoine de St. Exupery
Jules Verne
Jean-Paul Sartre
Voltaire
Alexander Dumas
Honore de Balzac

German:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Thomas Mann
Bertolt Brecht
Hermann Hesse
Günter Grass
Erich Maria Remarque
Arthur Schnitzler (Austrian)

Czech:
Franz Kafka

Russian:
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Anton Chekhov
Leo Tolstoy
Ivan Turgenev