NP:Greatest Dead Novelist

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 12:48:04 -0400 (EDT)
>From: kelber at mindspring.com
>Subject: NP:Greatest Dead Novelist
>
>There's a fair amount of agreement on this list that Pynchon is the 
>greatest living novelist.  But how about the greatest non-living novelist?  
>I vote vociferously for Dostoevsky.  Anyone disagree?
>
>Laura

Dostoevsky would also make it into my top-10, as would Melville, Dickens, 
Conrad, Kafka, Proust, Mann. Joyce probably ought to be in there as well, 
even though I've never particularly enjoyed Ulysses. On the top of the list, 
though, I'd have to put Cervantes, who more or less singlehandedly invented 
the novel in Don Quixote. To've written that book in the early 17th century 
is nothing short of astounding, and a lot of subsequent literary 
developments/innovations are already present in embryonic form in Cervantes 
masterpiece.