Is it Norman Mailer, Papa Hemingway, Bukowski, Doris Lessing, Walker Percy, Herman Melville, Phillip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Wolfe, F Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote
Nelson Algren, Sinclair Lewis Ford Maddox Ford,James T Farrell, William J Kennedy ? or some other...or maybe one can never quantify "greatest" when it comes to such subjective matters...also, Kilgore Trout must be giver special consideration.
A Confederacy of Dunces was one of those books you read more slowly as you come closer to finishing, to prolong the pleasure. I can easily imagine that Toole had as much fun writing it, as I had reading it.
¡±greatest¡± American writer is subjective, but I¡¯d vote Hemingway.
@Biscuit
He may have had fun writing it but he certainly didn't have any fun getting it published. He wound up taking his own life after being rejected by publishers so many times, they said it was pointless. Then his mother found the manuscript and basically forced her way into a professors office and sat there until he read it. The professor was hoping it would be bad so he could read a few pages and kick her out...the book won the Pulitzer the next year.
There are so many geniuses who are either ahead of their time or just too strange, that don't get the time of day. A lot of inventors fall into this category. Look up Goodyear.
@thorpe
Yeah I¡¯m familiar with that story of how he finally got published, and of his last days¡..how he went on a final road trip, visited the plantation in Georgia where his favorite writer Flannery OConnor had died young from lupus, years before, surrounded by her toucans and peacocks. It was a sad ending for both. It seems the 1960¡¯s as a whole were tragic, yet compelling, with premature deaths¡¡Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, OConnor, Toole, Jack Kerouac. I would add Mary Pinchot Meyer to the list. I¡¯m fascinated by her story. She wasn¡¯t a writer, but her murder and connections to JFK and Timothy Leary seems to epitomize the melancholy and weirdness of the times.
I just read about Goodyear, interesting story about another guy who made his mark, but never got the recognition or compensation he deserved. Gotta respect him for his genius, and his tenacity.
@thorpe
I looked up West, saw that his work is in a similar picaresque style as Confederacy of Dunces. I enjoy that type of novel, to me it¡¯s the literary equivalent of the Three Stooges, or maybe even Dumb and Dumber, or Idiocracy. Lower society knuckleheads who manage to get through life using their wits etc.
I ordered Locust + Lonelyhearts. Thanks for the tip. 
Biscuit , would you please give a little review of the Ward books after reading? would be appreciated thankyou.
While I'm here I would also like to make a case for John Irving his creativeness with characters is second to none.
The World According To Garp, Cider House Rules, A Prayer For Owen Meany and Hotel New Hampshire stand out among others.
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