Prose Masters

In my last post I talked about how Louis L’Amour is my favorite author and storyteller. Today, I want to mention a couple of people who are my favorites when it comes to beautiful writing: Pat Conroy and John Irving.

What do I mean by beautiful writing? I mean writers who are masters of the craft. Authors who wring the most of every word they put on a page. Writers who construct sentences so beautiful they make you want to cry. Authors who combine words in ways they weren’t meant to be combined, but somehow still make it seem natural.

Not that this is their only trick in the bag. These men have written darn good novels, to put it lightly: Conroy with books like The Great Santini and Irving with A Prayer for Owen Meany., among many of their bestsellers. I don’t suppose it would profit much to write flowery prose that the world never saw.

Conroy wrote of the American South, for the most part, and made the settings and people come alive. I don’t think this is original and don’t remember who said it, but the main criticism about Conroy is that he never wrote in one word what he could say in ten instead. Yes, his prose can be verbose, but I recently reread his later novel South of Broad and paused numerous times to stop and appreciate a sentence or phrase. Very few writers have ever had that gift. I wish he’d written more books over his career, but what he did write are treasures. He was one of a kind and made the English language bow to him instead of the other way around.

Irving has been more prolific over the decades. He’s not as flowery as Conroy, but the way he constructs sentences and paragraphs are a master class in the skill of writing. Whereas someone like me is just happy to not have any typos in a passage, the reader gets the feeling Irving obsesses over every sentence until it’s perfect and meshes with those around it. I remember reading once that he doesn’t start writing a book unless he has the last sentence written first. I might have mixed that interview up with someone else (and I’m not going to research it because I don’t want to) but even if apocryphal it speaks to his process. To read Irving is to admire his mastery of writing.

Any time I pick up a book by Conroy or Irving I know I’m in for a treat beyond just the story. Are there others like these two? I’m sure there are. But since this is my blog those are my two picks as favorite writers.